I just finished upgrading a three-server SharePoint 2010 farm (1 Web Front End (WFE01), 1 Application Server (APP01), and a separate Database Server; almost exactly as described in Jeff’s post How to Scale Out a SharePoint 2010 Farm from Two-Tier to Three-Tier By Adding a Dedicated Application Server) to Service Pack 1 and the June 2011 Cumulative Update. This isn’t going to be an exhaustive post that digs into the details of how to do this. I’m mostly just sharing a few things I either found interesting or would have liked to have known beforehand. Feel free to post your own comments below too.
Backup First!
Hopefully you will have the luxury of first installing the updates in an a test environment that is identical to your production environment. Unfortunately, I expect that isn’t going to be the case for most people. At least make sure that you have backups of both your databases and the servers. If you’re in a Hyper-V environment, make snapshots of the servers so you can revert if you have to.
Downloads
I recommend that you download EVERYTHING you’ll need before you begin installing anything. You would be in a pickle if you ended up not being able to download one of the necessary files in the middle of the process. You’ll have to request that Microsoft email you links to the Cumulative Updates—these aren’t available for public download otherwise. The CUs are executable zip files and they mostly contain only a single EXE.
The Install Order
Although there have been several posts both from Microsoft and other sources about the proper order to install things, there seems to be a lot of disagreement. This client was running SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition and was also running the Office Web Applications. Here are the general steps I followed and a few things I found notable.
- Install SharePoint Foundation 2010 SP1 on WFE01. (sharepointfoundation2010sp1-kb2460058-x64-fullfile-en-us.exe) This installed quickly in about 4-minutes. No reboot was required afterward.
- Install SharePoint Foundation 2010 SP1 on APP01. Another quick installation. A reboot was required, but the Application Server is running different services than the WFE, so this was not abnormal.
- Install SharePoint Server 2010 SP1 on WFE01. (officeserver2010sp1-kb2460045-x64-fullfile-en-us.exe) Took about 15-minutes to install.
- Install SharePoint Server 2010 SP1 on APP01. Took about 15-minutes to install and a reboot was required afterward.
- Run Configuration Wizard on WFE01. This took about 15-minutes. I go an error at the end, and then realized I was not logged in as the Farm account, so I logged back in with the SP_Farm account (that’s the account I usually use for setups). The second time it completed successfully in about 3-minutes.
- Run Configuration Wizard on APP01. Ran in about 5-minutes with no problems (logged in as SP_Farm this time though).
- Install Office Web Apps SP1 on WFE01. (wacserver2010sp1-kb2460073-x64-fullfile-en-us.exe) The install requests to stop and restart the SharePoint 2010 Timer Application. I allowed this so a reboot wouldn’t be required. It took less than 3-minutes to install.
- Install Office Web Apps SP1 on APP01. Installed in about 3-minutes.
- Run Configuration Wizard on WFE01. Ran in about 3-minutes without errors.
- Run Configuration Wizard on APP01. Ran in about 3-minutes without errors.
- Install June CU for SharePoint on WFE01. (435088_intl_x64_zip.exe) Took about 17-minute to install. I found it interesting that this file was nearly 1Gb; almost three times as large as SP1!
- Install June CU for SharePoint on APP01. Took about 18-minutes to install.
- Run Configuration Wizard on WFE01. Took about 7-minutes to run and I got an error at the end. Although I wasn’t prompted to reboot, it seems that a reboot is required after installing this. The Wizard ran in about 2-minutes after this.
- Run Configuration Wizard on APP01. I learned my lesson from before and rebooted before running this. It ran in about 4-minutes with no problems.
- Install June CU for Office Web Apps on WFE01. (434726_intl_x64_zip.exe) The install requests to stop and restart the SharePoint 2010 Timer Application. I allowed this so a reboot wouldn’t be required. It took less than 3-minutes to install.
- Install June CU for Office Web Apps on APP01. Process was exactly as previous step.
- Run Configuration Wizard on WFE01. Took about 7-minutes to run and was successful.
- Run Configuration Wizard on APP01. Took about 2-minutes to run and was successful.
A Coworker pointed out to me that I had overlooked installing the June 2011 Cumulative Update for SharePoint Foundation 2010. If I had to do it over, the following four steps would have been after step 10 above and before step 11.
- Install June CU for SharePoint Foundation 2010 on WFE01. (435083_intl_x64_zip.exe) When I tried to install this, it told me, “There are no products affected by this package installed on this system.” This indicated to me that everything in the Foundation 2010 CU was actually in the Server CU. So maybe this didn’t need to be installed afterall.
- Install June CU for Office Web Apps on APP01. See previous notes—I was able to skip this.
- Run Configuration Wizard on WFE01. No need for this since I didn’t install the CU.
- Run Configuration Wizard on APP01. No need for this since I didn’t install the CU.
Testing! Testing! Testing!
Regardless of whether you’re doing this in a production environment or a testing/development environment, you’ll want to test everything you can think of such as:
- Edit and View Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote documents in the browser.
- View My Sites.
- Test User Profile Synchronization. – After the updates, the User Profile Synchronization Service was stopped. I started it on the Application Server and all was well. One thing I noticed was that an incremental profile synchronization used to take 10- to 15-minutes to complete (it contained both import and export items). After the update it took less than 45-minutes.
- Tag Pages and check for tags in Newsfeed. – One of the problems the client had before the update was that Tag Profile pages didn’t display the All history (only the last sixty-days). After the update, Tag Profile pages were working properly.
- View a Visio Web Access Drawing in the Browser.
- Work in an Access Web Database site.
- Add an obscure word to a page or document, do an incremental search crawl, and search for the word.
- Add terms and/or term sets to the Managed Metadata store.
- View Reporting Services Reports (or Access Web Database Reports).