Important: August 2015 CU for SP 2013 might have failed silently when using specific installation methods

Many customers reported problems when installing August 2015 CU for SharePoint 2013. In the middle of the installation the installer suddenly stops with the following generic message:

The installation of this package failed.

This is a very generic error which can be caused by various different reasons but the specific problem in August CU is caused by a problem related to reregistration of the SharePoint performance counters. 
In the MSI logs you would find errors similar to the following:

CAQuietExec:  Error 0x8007000d: CAQuietExec Failed
CustomAction RegisterPerfmonManifest returned actual error code 1603 (note this may not be 100% accurate if translation happened inside sandbox)

As my colleague Tehnoon outlined on his blog post there is a workaround for this issue which requires to run the installer 3 times.

A critical problem is that some customers might not know that the installation of August 2015 CU failed – or more exact: that the CU installed only partially.

The reason is that this error will only show up if the hotfix package is installed without the /passive switch which hides the UI message of the fix.
As the /passive switch hides the installation error message customers will be under the impression that the installation succeeded while in reality only parts of the CU got installed.

This will also affect the installation script provided by Russ Maxwell.
Russ has meanwhile updated the installation script and removed the /passive switch to ensure that such installation problems are now no longer hidden.

My suggestion to customers who installed August 2015 CU using the /passive switch would be to install August 2015 CU for SharePoint 2013 again without the switch to confirm that it installed completely to prevent running a partially patched system.

All customers using the installation script from Russ Maxwell should ensure to update their script to the latest version provided by Russ on his blog.

2 Comments


  1. The product group released the August 2015 Cumulative Update for the SharePoint 2013 product family.

    Reply

  2. Buenas, Hace tiempo escribimos este post donde explicábamos cómo agilizar la instalación de las actualizaciones

    Reply

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