>My organization has used Virtual Server heavily for the past year and it
>works as advertised. The biggest nuisance that causes all types of
>complaints is that the virtual systems do not always have the latest
>operating system updates and hotfixes. Considering that many of the virtual
>machines are only turned on very rarely you can see why this is a very real
>concern.
>Does anyone have a best practices recommendation for getting around this? I
>thought I might be on to something by using the differencing disks in
>conjunction with a base O/S that is always getting updated. However, that is
>the wrong approach since the base O/S should be "built up" and then made read
>only to prevent corruption.
>
>I guess I am looking for a way have an auto-updating base disk with
>differencing disks sitting on top of it... has anyone been able to figure out
>this puzzle yet? Is VMWare any better at this?

>My organization has used Virtual Server heavily for the past year and it
>works as advertised. The biggest nuisance that causes all types of
>complaints is that the virtual systems do not always have the latest
>operating system updates and hotfixes. Considering that many of the virtual
>machines are only turned on very rarely you can see why this is a very real
>concern.
>

>If you are using Virtual Server rather than Virtual PC it is because
>you run a few servers, which are on all the time, right?
>This means the servers run 24/7 and should be able to get their
>updates from Windows Update all right. Where is the problem?
>Virtual Server = virtual machines run whenever the host runs
>Virtual PC = virtual machines run only as started by the interactive
>user