Happy New Year 2012 to everyone….

In this Post, will see the step by step installation of Exchange 2010 SP2 and highlighting few things that you should know before installing Exchange Server 2010 SP2 in your production. First thing is to Test it in lab environment before installing in production environment.

What you must know before installing Exchange 2010 SP2:
SP2 includes schema changes

With certain new features, Exchange 2010 SP2 updates the schema. To understand what changes happen when you run Exchange 2010 SP2 read the Exchange Server Active Directory Schema Changes Reference, November 2011

Since, the installer will be requiring modifications to Schema, user account used for installation of SP2 must be a member of Schema Admins group in active directory. As a best practice, make sure that this user account is removed from the group once the schema extension is complete.

Windows Server Features are required for CAS Role

In Exchange Server 2010 CAS is the primary entry point for clients to any Exchange Server 2010 Environment. With this release, a few more features are added in the CAS server role which makes on premise and Office 365 integration a better experience and also an improvement that makes the silent redirection better within cross site CAS roles. A new feature called Mini Outlook Web App now exists that works on no cookies, no scripts model.

Below are Windows Server Role Features that you need to install before installing SP2 on CAS Role.

• IIS 6 WMI Compatibility
• ASP.NET
• ISAPI Filters
• Client Certificate Mapping Authentication
• Directory Browsing
• HTTP Errors
• HTTP Logging
• HTTP Redirection
• Tracing
• Request Monitor
• Static Content

After we finish with adding Windows Server Role Features which required to proceed with SP2 installation we run Setup.

1. Go to the folder which you have download from Microsoft site the Exchange 2010 SP2, unzip the Exchange 2010 SP2 package first, then launch setup program.

2. Follow the wizard, start to install SP2, read through the introduction and click Next button

3. Read through the license agreement, accept it and click Next button.

4. Next step Readiness Checks, Setup wizard finished successfully click Install.

5. Completion and final step is completed successfully, choose Finish.

6. After the installation is complete, we’ll see the following message, which informs us that we need to reboot the system for changes to take effect.

7. After reboot we can see that our Exchange Server was installed successfully SP2, Build number 14.2 (Build 247.5)

Installing Updates on DAG is not a normal exercise

Many of us run DAG because of its proven reliability and ability to make a highly available mailbox database system. Installing updates on a member of a DAG is not a regular installation though, for that reason please visits the link bellow in case you have DAG and you want to upgrade to SP2.

Upgrade Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2010 SP1 or Exchange 2010 SP2
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb629560.aspx