Thursday, 28 April 2016

Configuration Manager (CB) Upgrades - what you should not do

System Center Configuration Manager landing page

 The Configuration Manager Product Group shared this information on our monthly call last night. There was no objection to me publishing it here. I hope you find it useful.

 This is a list of things that you absolutely should NOT do in relation to upgrading Configuration Manager (Current Branch) to a newer version. It seems that some IT Pros are being creative in trying to resolve problems and in some cases are making them worse.

 So, here we go - #4 is my personal favourite.
  1. Do NOT manually clean up EasySetupPayload folder for CM update that is being downloaded/processed.
  2. Do NOT manually clean up CMU without confirming the correct state and content library for the Easy Setup package.
  3. Do NOT restore the CM database/CM site server if there is an error with CM update (fix the issue and "retry installation").
  4. Do NOT reinstall the Service Connection Point if an update is in progress.
  5. Do NOT use 1602 cd.latest to install a standalone primary site (Note: you can use this method to install a child primary to a 1602 CAS).
  6. Do NOT use 1602 cd.latest to upgrade a 1511 site or R2 SP1 (or earlier) site.
  7. Do NOT manually clean up any CM_Update* tables.
  8. Do NOT restart CMU service during installation.
  9. Do NOT keep the CMUStaging\<Guid> folder open during installation.
  10. Do NOT copy files in CMUStaging.
  11. Do NOT restart SMSEXEC during payload download (dmpdownloader.log shows if the package content is downloading). The Notification can get lost in that scenario.
Microsoft will try to make most of these more resilient in release 1606.

 I hope this helps. Until next time......
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3 comments:

  1. Anonymous2 May 2016 at 06:23

    The question then is what to do when you are stuck at status "downloading", "checking prerequisites" or "installing" and there is relevant information in CMupdate.log or ConfigmgrSetup.log?

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    1. Gerry Hampson3 May 2016 at 13:31

      The Easy Setup is a work in progress and Microsoft are really keen to streamline and perfect the process. If you have a problem you should start by searching the TechNet forum. If you can't find a similar issue you should start a new thread.

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  2. Andy16 May 2016 at 13:34

    Gerry, with regard to 5 & 6 - do we know the technical reason why neither of these activities should not be done? For point 5, from what I understand, you can use the cd.latest folder to install a new standalone site and you MUST use the cd.latest sources when you need to perform a site recovery when you have a version 1602 backup.
    For point 6, although I haven't tried an upgrade, yet, the pre-requisite checker does not throw any error when ran on a 2012 R2 site.

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