LukasSMSFT Thanks for the comment. I believe all the performance counters updated successfully, the logs indicate they all completed, it's right after that step where the error occurred. Yes, turned off Microsoft Defender realtime setting Set-MpPreference -DisableRealtimeMonitoring $true. I notice the antimalware service still uses CPU so I don't think the command does anything even though I also see the tic mark in the UI is off as well. Might be M365 Defender, can't turn that off. Or maybe sysmon gets in the way? Whatever the case, I had to reboot, manually stop all Exchange services and re-started the upgrade. It seems to have picked up where it left off and completed without further drama. This is the first time I have experienced an issue with a CU since the healthchecker was published.