SharePoint 2010 October CU fails to configure

I was recently patching some servers when I ran into an issue with the October 2011 Cumulative Update updating on all of the servers. It would get to 17% and fail. When I looked in the Event Logs, there was an error from SPUpgradeJobDefinition that has some standard text followed by localStoragePath. This is a new one for me, but after looking around a little bit, I found this article that describes the problem. Sure enough, the search topology was throwing errors. We deleted the SSA and reran psconfig and it ran through with no errrors.

This was a reminder to me that there is a defined process for patching and upgrading SharePoint, and I had skipped “Document the environment”. If I had taken the time to review the environment before getting started, I would have seen this error and fixed it before I got started. So review the process, learn it, love it, and live it.