Forum Discussion
SharePoint 2013: December 2016 Cumulative Update - Recommendations
I'm looking for recommendations regarding installing the SP 2013 - December 2016 CU. I've installed it in our other non-production environments and the average install per server was ~6 hours. Of course, you should only install the CU on one server at a time, but that would cause us to have over 24 hours of downtime, not including rollback; if necessary.
I need to optimize the installation and minimize the downtime. Any positive advice is greatly appreciated.
The reason it takes so long by default is that in SharePoint 2013 every cumulative update has .msp files for every individual component. If you have multiple languages, the number is even higher. Each of these .msp files stop and restart the necessary services and application pools - this is what makes it so slow. The scripts Trevor Seward mentions shutdown and disable them beforehand so it is much quicker to install them. For SharePoint 2016 the patching process is a bit different: there aren't that many individual patches anymore so less services have to be stopped and started again resulting in a faster patching process. I still use the scripts for 2016 too though.
- 2016 actually performs that start/stop, which is why you don't necessarily need a script for it.
- These scripts will cut down your install time to ~25-30 minutes per server for the binary portion of the installation:
https://github.com/Nauplius/SharePoint-Patch-Script
The original script the above is based off is at:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/russmax/2013/04/01/why-sharepoint-2013-cumulative-update-takes-5-hours-to-install/
