SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I was recently involved with helping a client expand a 2010 farm by adding 2 more servers to an existing environment.

It should have have been a straight forward task to install the SP2010 binaries, Service Pack etc and join the new servers to the existing farm.

Checking the documentation for the existing farm I could that the following build was in use

SharePoint 2010 RTM & SP1 & Feb 2012 CU & June 2012 CU & Brazil Portuguese Language Pack & Language Pack SP1 & Office Web Apps.

I gathered all the media together and settled down for a day of watching the blue bar.

After all the installs I planned to run the Configuration Wizard up to the PassPhrase step to ensure the servers were ready to be joined at a later point.

Running the Configuration Wizard on one of the ‘New’ servers I was able to connect to the Configuration database but the Configuration Wizard was stopping at the Patch screen reporting a patch mismatch between the current farm servers and the new server.

The Patch status was reporting that the June 2012 CU was not installed on any of the other servers, even thought it clearly was !.

After much head scratching and chatting to colleagues I was at bit of a loss as to what the issue could be, I was thinking about running a PsConfig b2b on one the ‘live’ servers, but decided to keep looking around and finally found a discrepancy in Control Panel –> Programs –> View Installed Updates, comparing the new server with one of the current servers I noticed a difference in the installed updates for the Language Pack, the ‘new’ server was showing 13 updates for the Language Pack compared to existing servers that were only showing 1

After another chat with one of my colleagues we established that in the current live environment the Language Pack had been installed after the June 2012 CU, where as when i built the ‘New’ servers I had installed the Language Pack before the CU, and as the CU’s are multilingual a number of extra Hotfixes had been installed.

The solution in this case was simply remove and reapply the Language Pack over the CU, now the new servers could be added to the current farm.