Preparing SharePoint 2013 farm for Windows OS patching

Question

I have a SharePoint 2013 farm where OS patches were not applied for a long time and now we want to close this gap. Just to clarify - we will not install any SP/Office patch, it will be mostly security patches for OS, IE and .NET.

We have an option to stop the farm for the time patches will be applied. And we need to ensure that no content and configuration will be changed during the patch. This way in case something goes really wrong we could simply restore server VMs from snapshot without having to do a full farm restore.

I've been told by our OS support that the servers will be restarted multiple times. So stopping services like SPTimer and IIS will not be enough since it will restart again. I was thinking to change startup setting for services to Disabled. When the patching will be completed we will start IIS and check if sites are up and running. Then we change the startup settings back to original values and restart the servers once again.

The list of services I'm planning to temporarily disable:

• SharePoint Administration
• SharePoint Timer Service
• SharePoint Tracing Service
• SharePoint Search Host Controller
• World Wide Web Publishing Service

So my primary question is it OK to change SharePoint service startup settings?

And I would welcome any general suggestions on this plan...

Answer 1

You can change the startup options, but I'd ask "why?". There's no technical reason that you would need to start or stop services before, during, or after OS level patching.