Over this past weekend I was helping a client with some issues with the 4-server SharePoint 2010 farm. As part of the process we decided to go ahead and put the October 2012 CU into their farm. I know, test in a dev/test environment first, we didn’t follow best practice. We were in a bit of an emergency/time crunch and just needed to get things going, but that’s beside the point.

After installing the binaries on all 4 servers, and rebooting them, I launched the configuration wizard on one of the servers. Up pops an errors message saying that the binaries haven’t been installed on one of the web front end servers. WHAT?!?! (sorry, it was 2 am and I didn’t get a screen shot). I double checked everything, the update was in the installed programs, I did install the right CU (it was 2 am). I tried reinstalling and got the message that the hotfix wasn’t applicable to my installation. It was already there. I can see it just fine, the hotfix installation package knows it’s already been installed, but the configuration wizard doesn’t. Some searching reveals some people with similar issues saying they had to remove the server from the farm and rebuild it…it’s 2am, let me thing, um…NO!!

So, a little more searching reveals this blog post relating to the same issues with an older hot fix – http://www.sharepointks.com/post/Cumulative-update-issue-The-upgrade-command-is-invalid-or-a-failure-has-been-encountered.aspx. It says, pop open the SharePoint Management Console and run Get-SPProduct –Local and then the configure wizard will run fine. What the heck, I’ve got nothing to lose, people are already saying rebuild the farm. So, I run the PowerShell command, relaunch the configuration wizard and everything runs as planned. Yeah!! Much better than a server rebuild J

Just to let everyone know, the CU didn’t cause any further problems in production and the farm is back up and running normal.