With the release of Exchange Server 2013 Service Pack 1 organizations can begin to plan the upgrade of their existing Exchange 2013 servers.
Before proceeding I encourage you to review the release notes and if possible deploy SP1 first in a test lab environment where you can perform testing of any deployment or integration scenarios that are relevant to your unique environment.
Deploying Service Pack 1 for Exchange Server 2013 is essentially the same process as any cumulative update deployment.
Note: After an upgrade to Exchange Server 2013 SP1 you may find that external mail flow is not working until the Frontend Transport Service is restarted.
First, you will need to remove any UM language packs that you have installed. From an elevated cmd prompt navigate to the folder where you have extracted the Exchange 2013 SP1 files and run setup with the /RemoveUMLanguagePack switch. For example, to remove the “de-DE” language pack:
C:\Admin\exchange2013sp1>setup.exe /RemoveUMLanguagePack:de-DE
Until new SP1-specific UM language packs have been released you can reinstall the CU3 language packs after the SP1 upgrade is complete.
Exchange Server 2013 SP1 includes a schema update and Active Directory changes. This will be applied automatically when you upgrade the first server, or you can manually apply it by running setup with the /PrepareSchema parameter for just the schema update first, or /PrepareAD to apply all the Active Directory changes in one step.
C:\Admin\exchange2013sp1>Setup.exe /PrepareAD /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms
Use Michael B Smith’s script to verify that the schema update applied successfully. The SP1 schema version is 15292.
When you’re ready to upgrade the servers themselves use setup with the /Mode:Upgrade switch.
C:\Admin\exchange2013sp1>setup.exe /mode:upgrade /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms
Remember to refer to the update procedures here for the order of upgrades for each server role as well as the preparation tasks for database availability group members.
This article Upgrading Exchange Server 2013 Servers to Service Pack 1 is © 2014 ExchangeServerPro.com
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