Exchange 2010 Rollup 2 SP3

jibbajabba

Beware

Update Rollup 2 for Exchange 2010 SP3 prompts for install files | Steve Goodman's Exchange Blog

Found that after hours of googling after a failed windows update. This blog article might be the solution. Might, because my update is still running ...

elTorito

I've learned to postpone installing these rollups until I'm reasonably sure I won't be wrecking our Exchange environment. How? By reading through all the user comments posted at the Exchange Team Blog:

Released: Update Rollups for Exchange 2007 & Exchange 2010 and Security Updates for Exchange 2013 - Exchange Team Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

It seems that lately, each and every rollup released by Microsoft has brought with it a fair share of bugs - some of them quite serious.

I'd advise every Exchange admin to do the same.

jibbajabba

We had a massive outage due to a Rollup Update once, which is why we stopped deploying them in production. I only ever update my own Exchange Server which is backed up with Veeam on a 14-Day rotation ... So I don't care that much if it breaks. But the outage I mentioned lasted 19hrs. Wasn't so much of an outage, but the update took 19hrs to install, during which time the services are obviously stopped. 12k mailboxes unavailable is hard / uncomfortable to explain, especially when Microsoft was telling us "yea, that might take a while but nothing we / you can do".

elTorito

Luckily, we can use our NetApp's snapshot/flexclone functionality to bring our entire production environment into a logically segregated ESXi test environment. This allows us to measure installation times and notice any peculiarities encountered during setup (such as the one you mentioned above).

However, it's simply impossible to test all application-specific functionality.

For example, with SP2 RU5, we introduced into production the bug that prohibits the soft deletion of messages. This only affected specific message types, so we didn't catch the bug during testing. I'd expect Microsoft, with their infinite resources, to prevent bugs such as these from slipping past QC...

One major mistake Microsoft's made with their patching mechanism for Exchange 2010 is to integrate critical security updates into their rollups and service packs, rather than separate security fixes from functionality fixes. If a security vulnerability is found, I want to be able to quickly and decisively plug that vulnerability with a small hotfix, rather than having to install an entire rollup - which may or may not break something else in Exchange. It's pure crap, the community thinks it's crap, but Microsoft persists that they cannot change this for the remainder of the product's lifecycle...