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Thursday, September 02, 2010

Installing Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1


I had a few hassles installing Microsoft Exchange 2010 SP1 today.

I guess if things ran smoothly all the time, I wouldn't have a job, but....

All worked perfectly yesterday on our virtualised test setup, but in real life, it is never that simple.

The Exchange Team have provided a handy list of prerequisites and known problems with SP1 in their "Exchange 2010 SP1 FAQ and Known Issues" blog post. Read it carefully.

On one of our CAS servers, I got an error warning me of a failed installation. Following the instructions in "How does Exchange 2007 setup know to resume a failed setup?", I determined that there had been a previous error installing the Admin Tools. Clobbering the registry entry (the one with the install value) enabled the install to proceed.

After the install, an attempt to start the Management Console failed. Turning again to the MS Exchange Team's blog provided the solution, in "Troubleshooting Exchange 2010 Management Tools startup issues". In our case, the Service Pack install had stripped the WSMan module entry from the global modules section of C:\Windows\System32\Inetsrv\config\ApplicationHost.config. Adding it back in after the SP1 install and restarting the default web site, that issue was solved. We had to do this on all our Exchange 2010 boxes.

Next error came moving the active database from one DAG member server to another. Corrupt index. After a quick Google I discovered that restarting the Windows Search (Exchange) service on the Mailbox servers was enough to fix this issue. I guess a reboot after the Service Pack install would have had the same effect, even though the Service Pack install didn't request one.

It is all working fine now (fingers crossed).


Posted by Phil at 9:07 PM
Edited on: Thursday, September 02, 2010 9:50 PM
Categories: Comment, Software