Use Powershell Get-Hotfix to get all hotfixes on Windows server

Question: How can I  get all hotfixes on a Windows Server? Also, I’d like to compare list of hotfixes on 2 different servers?

I’ve read the post , and this returns the software ,How to get a list of software installed on a server using Powershell.  But I’m looking for hotfixes

Answer: The Powershell cmdlet Get-Hotfix  returns all hotfixes applied to a server.

To get a list of hotfixes on a server

#I’ve included installed on 
get-hotfix –ComputerName SERVER1| select hotfixid, installedon | sort-object hotfixid

To compare 2 servers , use the Powershell utility cmdlet  Compare-Object to compare the output.

Step 1: create the 2 output files – one for each server.

get-hotfix -ComputerName server1| select hotfixid | sort-object hotfixid > C:\server1.txt
get-hotfix -ComputerName server2| select hotfixid | sort-object hotfixid> C:\server2.txt

Step 2 : Compare the 2 output files and report on any differences. The Compare-Object cmdlet compares two objects and let’s you know the difference

Compare-Object -ReferenceObject (Get-Content C:\server1.txt) -DifferenceObject (Get-Content  server2.txt)

This is an example of  the Compare-Object cmdlet. This result indicates the hotfixes exist on server1 but do not exist on server2. This is very useful information for troubleshooting sudden problems due to a patch install!

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