When you are creating a golden image for MCS do you have to treat that image like it is a non persistent machine when installing apps? (even though the machines it spawns wont be non-persistant)

I would say for the most part yeah. Some apps do have specific instructions when installing on non-persistent workloads. Anything specific you looking at or just in general? I may be simplifying it but I see it no different than creating a template you are going to use to build additional servers from

Just general. Well MS Defender for sure but i see there is info out there to read. Do i need MCS to build a template to push servers out and then update only the gold image to push them out again?

sorry no, I was just comparing it to normal server builds from a template. antivirus software is always one that will normally have a specific install process for non-persistent.

Ok, maybe i don't even need MCS then? Currenlty we are patching 15 servers, updating apps on them ect. Is there a way to create a gold image patch and update that and push it out for users to log in? These pushed out machines will be persistant.

so they will be persistent vms and do they have to be?

Its not like they have to be persistent. We just never bothered with the headach of non persistent cause we had no need.

If they are persistent you still can use MCS to push out the server originally but once deployed they would have to be managed like other vms with whatever you are using for configuration managements etc…

ok, so to get that feature of just updating 1 monthly they need to be non-persistent. And for them to be non-persitant you need mcs

and it’s a lot easier to roll back if there is an issue with non-persistent.