Yesterday, late last night in Europe, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 became available to the general public. That means it will be pushed via Windows Updates or that you can download it manually here Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (KB976932)

I’ve been busy doing deployments in the lab but also in production at several locations. The speed of a deployment depends on the host and what’s running on that host. I’ve seen anything between 22 minutes and 65 minutes. For a walk through of an install see my previous blog post on this Upgrading a Hyper-V R2 Cluster to Windows 2008 R2 SP1

I’ve also noticed an increased amount of hits for my blog on error 0x00f0818 when installing the Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Beta. The same solution holds true for RTM. More info on that is available at Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Beta Install Gone Wrong: Service Pack Installation failed with error code 0x800f0818

I had one place where dozens of VMs had this issue so in order to progress quickly we scripted the replacement of the C:WindowsservicingPackages folder content with know good files in bulk. Read the above mentioned article to learn about the security settings you’ll need to address in any automated solution (use takeown F c:WindowsServicingPackages /D y /R & cacls c:WindowsServicingPackages /E /T /C /G “UserName”:F  to take care of business). That saved us the time to check on each affected server individually what packages were involved. This works but test this before using it in production and don’t forget to return the security settings to the default when you’re done. In this case it was a rather large lab environment.