SharePoint 2013 Service Pack 1 Fails

Rolled out Service Packs on  6 DEV Servers , Shared Services UAT farm all went well apart from couple of niggling issues like the following but overall it was successful:

Search Host Controller Service stuck in Starting State
User Profile Sync Service stuck in Starting state

Those were pretty straight forward to fix but the killer one appeared on the Pre-Prod environment which connects to Production domain controller. Everything looked good  till we ran Product and Config Wizard I reckon that's where all the Fun starts huh :). Failed at the Last step.

“   Unable to create a Service Connection Point in the current Active Directory domain. Verify that the SharePoint container exists in the current domain and that you have rights to write to it.

Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: The object LDAP://CN=Microsoft SharePoint Products,CN=System,DC=emea,DC=cbre,DC=net doesn't exist in the directory.

   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPServiceConnectionPoint.Ensure(String serviceBindingInformation)

   at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.UpgradeTask.Run() “

The container Microsoft SharePoint Products was missing in ADSI Active Directory Service Interface Editor. 

As it's a Shared Services environment and so many install / farms account and Pre-Prod environment for Shared Services leveraged across Intranet and Extranet farms,  it made sense to create an Active Directory Group called as SharePointFarmAdmins and add all install and farms accounts in it.

Once that was done, our AD guy created the container and granted the required ( write on the container ) permissions to SharePointFarmAdmins group. 

Re-ran the Product Configuration Wizard success. 

There are some specific Power Shell command let's which allows you to Get  and Set the Service Connection Point SCP which you can run from SharePoint 2013 Management Shell. 

To Get: 

Get-SPFarmConfig -ServiceConnectionPoint 

To Set : 

 Set-SPFarmConfig -ServiceConnectionPointBindingInformation StringwithBindingInformation

To create the Microsoft SharePoint Products container in ADSI  ,  follow the instructions from here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff730261(v=office.14).aspx

The roll out of Service Packs , Cumulative updates , solutions  etc.. to go through a SDLC process etc.... emphasizes the importance of having a Pre-Prod environments which I have seen some organization ignores due to cost related issues or awareness of how it will play a pivotal role.

PS: Make sure WSS Usage DB is not part of Always On Group in case you're using Availability Groups in SQL Server 2012