With Exchange 2013, Microsoft made changes to how it approaches updates and patches. Essentially, every few months there are what would have previously been termed update roll-ups, which are now called cumulative updates (CU). Each CU however is a full build of Exchange 2013, rather than a collection of patches. The same holds true for the recently released Exchange 2013 SP1; this isn’t a service pack in the traditional sense, it’s once again a full build of Exchange. That doesn’t mean you can’t upgrade over your existing Exchange 2013 install, but this isn’t a patch you can push through WSUS.
Our SP1 upgrade started poorly. Almost immediately, during the prerequisite check, we received the following error:
Following that link resulted in a completely useless page indicating that Microsoft hadn’t yet added any info about that error message. Gee, thanks. Searching the web didn’t turn up anything relevant either, hence this post.
I used Sysinternals Process Monitor to try and determine what application(s) were using eseutil. It turned out our backup application was doing so, but even after stopping the backup and disabling the service, the files remained open. Looking further, I found Volume Shadow Copy (VSC) also using eseutil. I disabled that, along with my anti-virus for good measure, but the files stayed open. I ended up rebooting the server with my backup app and VSC disabled, and that allowed me to move forward.
The upgrade itself went fine and conveniently once the process starts no user interaction is required. You do need to manually reboot the server once the install is done, and I found Exchange took a bit longer than normal to get started after the reboot, but other than that things seem fine.
Trials of a Network Admin 