Friday night, I’ve prepared myself to update SharePoint the following week-end to Service Pack 1 and August 2011 Cumulative Update. I’ve started the update at 4AM Saturday morning and it tooks 13 hours to complete. My biggest fear was to run into a failure process. So to reduce my stress, I’ve taken a lot of precautions.

Backup or die
Never, ever going down the road of update without knowing the way to come back. Not only checking if the backup is good, but making sure to control the process to restore it and making work. So, in my case, I’ve asked my admin collegues to take an Image SnapShot of each SharePoint Server 2010, and a special SQL Backup of all my SharePoint databases. And also, I’ve asked them, nicely, if they were available over the week-end.

Training, it’s like working without stress
When an astronaut goes into space, he trains and repeats the work he will do up there. Working in a production environment is the same principal. Don’t do something in production, if you didn’t have tried it before. Three times I have repeat theses update steps in my non-production farms. And every time, I ran into different problems.

Review the steps again and again… and again.
Microsoft has written great articles on how to prepare and how to install an update on SharePoint Server 2010. These two articles are my bedtime reading for the last days… And believe me, it helps to sleep.

• Prepare to deploy software updates
• Install a software update

Stay close, but be polite with your guests
During the update process, there is nothing to do but waiting for a process completion in order to start the next. In my pre-production farm, it took more than an hour for August 2011 Cumulative update to complete on one server. So I put my laptop on the kitchen table, keep an eye on it from time to time, an prepare the dinner. And for the info… The salmon was pretty good, perfectly grill on the my BBQ.

Reboot, PSConfig, IISReset, Recycle App, WSP and Mary has a little lamb
I’m glad, it’s over. 13 hours later, I’m glad to say that my effort paid off. My SharePoint 2010 production farm is now running under SP1 and August 2011 CU.

Step by Step update process for SP1 and CU

Here’s the right sequence to update SharePoint 2010 to service pack 1 and cumulative update.

1. SharePoint Foundation SP1
2. SharePoint Foundation Language Pack SP1 (if you have any other than english.)
3. SharePoint Server SP1
4. SharePoint Server Language Pack SP1 (Again, if you have any other than english.)
5. Reboot the server
6. Run the SharePoint Config Wizard (In my case I had to run it twice. The first one failed because of the User Profile Sync need to be started manually)
7. SharePoint Server Cumulative Update (starting from June 2011)
8. Reboot the Server
9. Run the SharePoint Config Wizard
10. IISReset
11. Start Central Admin and verify the Manage Services on Server to check that everything is started as before.
12. Reset the Search Index
13. Start a full crawl.

I know that some reports said that Server SP1 contains Foundation SP1, but by installing the Foundation SP1 before the Server SP1, it will overwrite any update push by the foundation SP1. And in this way, you will be sure to update everything that it needs too.

However, for Cumulative Update, Stefen Goßner mentions in his blog:

Be aware that the SharePoint Server 2010 CU contains the SharePoint Foundation CU. And the SharePoint Server 2010 with Project Server CU contains Project Server CU, SharePoint Server CU and SharePoint Foundation CU. That means only one package has to be installed for the SharePoint 2010 product family.

Full article is here. Stefan provide also links to download all required patches.

Also, take a look of the SharePoint Update section in Technet.