How To Upgrade Exchange 2010 to SP1

by Ian Matthews – September 7, 2010

Like previous versions of Exchange, the Service Pack is the full version.  In other words, there really isn’t an upgrade version to download.  You download the Exchange 2010 WITH SP1 and if you already have Exchange 2010, it will automatically detect the existing install and perform an upgrade.

This install was pretty pain free other than the pre-req’s.  They were a pain.  As those prereq’s get added to Windows Update, I expect they will go away, but as of Sept 2010, you got some work to do!

1. Backup your server.  In my case that meant shutting down the Hyper-V Virtual Machine my Exchange 2010 server was running on and copying the VHD to a safe location, then restarting the VM.
2. Download SP1 from Microsoft HERE (no, it does not show up in Windows Update) and then run the downloaded file.  It will expand from .5GB to 1.3GB and then you can delete the download file.
3. Run Windows Update and install everything you can.  This will likely require a reboot which is not a bad thing prior to an upgrade.
4. Install the prequisites:
   • Most of the preq’s which I installed said the server needed to be rebooted but I choose to ignore that message.  I installed one after the other and then rebooted the server only once.  All appears well.
   • If you are like me, you won’t take my word for it that you need these fixes and because quite a number of them are likely to show up in Windows Update in coming months you might be right.  Soooo, if you are like me, just run the SETUP.EXE from the downloaded SP1 package, click through the first few screens until the PREREQ checker shows and then install what you need.
     

     SOFTWARE	Windows Server 2008 SP2	Windows Server 2008 R2
     AD RMS	KB977624	KB979099
     .NET Framework 2.0	KB979744 KB973136	KB979744
     .NET Framework 3.5		KB982867
     ASP.NET 2.0	KB983440 KB979917	KB983440 KB977020 (CAS)
     RPC	KB977592
     UCMA (UM)	Speech Platform Runtime UCMA Runtime 2.0	UCMA Runtime 2.0
     Content Filtering (Mailbox,  Mbx)	Office 2010 Filter Pack	Office 2010 Filter Pack

5. Launch SETUP.EXE from your SP1 download, choose UPGRADE ONLY LANGUAGES FROM THE DVD (if you want to make this easy) and then click INSTALL MICROSOFT EXCHANGE SERVER UPGRADE.  Look for that word UPGRADE.  If you don’t see it, you’ve got problems:
   

6. As you can see above my upgrade took 1 hour complete and the Exchange 2010 Build / Version number changed from 14.00.0702 to 14.01.0218.013 with SP1
7. Run another Windows Update to make sure there are no post SP1 patches (’cause you know there will be some!)

I was surprised and pleased to find the server did NOT need to be rebooted after the upgrade. 

Enjoy!