SharePoint 2013: August 2015 Cumulative Update Package Fails to Install

Update 9/17/2015: The issue has been fixed. See Solution for details

The Problem

The August 2015 Cumulative Update for SharePoint 2013 was released earlier this month as mentioned in Stefan’s Goßner’s blog post here. The installation of the August 2015 Cumulative Update server package may fail with the following error:

“The installation of this package failed”

The error above is a generic error and can occur due to a variety of different reasons such as low disk space, incorrect package download etc. However, for the August 2015 Public Update we have received several reports over the past few days of this issue occurring on multiple machines. In all these occurrences, the root cause of the package installation failure was found to be the following messages in the latest modified MSP log file (e.g. wssmui-en-us_MSPLOG.LOG, but the actual file name in your case could be different depending on which package failed to install) located in the temp folder of the server where you are installing the package (by default, it is C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Temp\2):

CAQuietExec: Error 0x8007000d: CAQuietExec Failed

CustomAction RegisterPerfmonManifest returned actual error code 1603 (note this may not be 100% accurate if translation happened inside sandbox)

The Workaround

The best workaround for this issue is to simply run the installation package 3 times. The package will fail to install with the above error on the first two attempts, but should be successful on the third attempt. The installation will not be corrupt and there are no other known issues once you have the update package successfully installed.

Note: A previous version of this blog post mentioned a registry key workaround which is not as effective as originally thought. If the installation package continues to fail with the error mentioned above even after the 3rd attempt, please let me know.

The Root Cause

The issue was being caused due to an error while registering a new Performance Counter within the SharePoint Search sub-system.

The Solution

The issue has been fixed with the September 2015 Server/Uber packages for SharePoint 2013 which were released last night (9/16/2015). If you haven’t already installed the August 2015 Server/Uber package, you may install the September 2015 Uber/Server package in your farm which includes all updates since SP1 and also has the package installation issue fixed. Please note that you must already have SharePoint Server 2013 Service Pack 1 installed before installing this package. The relevant full server packages (aka Uber packages) can be downloaded at the links below: