Who in their right mind trusts Microsoft with their record of patching QA, to hot patch servers and if they did, should be sacked on the spot !
Just saw that I got yesterday's KB5046696 hotpatch update installed even on Arm64 (ThinkPad T14s Gen 6).
I found this video: mgK8BGbxUHc (sorry I can't post links yet because apparently I'm too new here) For one it seems to be doable on any HCI by invoking ksrcmd.exe like shown in the video (I'm trying to dig out an HCI 21H2 iso to test this as we speak) And for two, in the comments the OP said that you can extract Microsoft-Windows-CoreSystem-SoftReboot(-AddOn-Package?) and add it to a regular Server 2022 image to get it working on there as well. That I have no idea, but maybe you or someone here that knows how to extract FoDs from an image might be able to do this. UPDATE: Tested on Azure Stack HCI 20348.587 with the command in the video and it works out of the box UPDATE 2: I found that for Server 1909 and earlier (including 2019, maybe 2016?) Microsoft-Windows-CoreSystem-SoftReboot is available as a FoD cab inside their respective FoD ISOs. Grabbed one for Server 2019 and installed it on build 17763.1 (has to be .1 because newers won't work as the FoD isn't updated unless you install it prior to updating past .1) and it worked like a charm. For Server 2022 and beyond it's exclusive to HCI so you'll still have to somehow extract the package from it.
I also tried out Hotpatching on 2025 and can confirm that by adding just this: Code: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Hotpatch\Environment] "AllowRebootlessUpdates"=dword:00000001 and installing the base CU provided in the Hot .msu then it works (tested KB5046696 - 26100.2240, which requires KB5044284 - 26100.2303). However Windows update still didn't pick up any Hotpatch updates after installing .2303 and I tried adding other registry values (excluding those that were meant for clients) without much success. I wonder if they actually check for licenses now.
Appears to be so. It could have just been me getting confused and not knowing what to add exactly. I can try again however if you tell me exactly which other values to add to the registry, but so far Hotpatching is only .msu for me.
Could client hotpatching also become (unofficially) available for Pro, IoT Enterprise Subscription and IoT Enterprise users aswell, aside from those version-specific (Enterprise E3/E5/F3 and Education A3/A5)?