Hello,

I am currently waiting for an Exchange 2013 CU9 update from CU1 to complete.

It seems to be doing OK. But for each step, starting at the Transport Service (step 10 of 18), something takes an extremely long time in the beginning of the step.

The "powershell" log files that it makes for each role all pause for 1 hour and 24-25 minutes after the log message

Set-EnvironmentVariable -Name "ExchangeInstallPath" -Value "$RoleInstallPath" -Target Machine;

Like this example from the Install-ClientAccessRole-<timestamp>.ps1 file:

# [ID = AllRolesCommonFirst_RunOnce___9fae27cba21348db814fcc4ffc0a7fe8, Wt = 1, isFatal = True] "Configuring the server."
15-09-2015 01:44:19:
          Set-EnvironmentVariable -Name "ExchangeInstallPath" -Value "$RoleInstallPath" -Target Machine;
        

# Tasks for 'All Roles Common First' component
# [ID = AllRolesCommonFirst___3e69ba31a53e4c29a2d6bffcf78cc614, Wt = 5, isFatal = True] "Starting the WMI service."
15-09-2015 03:08:23:
          if (Get-Service winmgmt* | ?{ $_.Name -ieq "winmgmt" })
          {
            Set-Service winmgmt -StartupType Automatic
            Start-SetupService -ServiceName winmgmt
          }
        

What places I can look at to investigate what takes so long during or after the Set-EnvironmentVariable step?

I have stopped backup service, unchecked "check for publisher's certificate revocation" in IE. CPU and memory are pretty much idle/non-used, and the disk I/O is also very low.

I closed the Server Manager and terminated the backup service's system tray icon process, and all of a sudden things moved faster. I don't know which of the two were slowing things down.

After the completed setup, the ExchangeSetup.Log indicates that it was indeed the Set-EnvironmentVariable operation that took forever:

[09-15-2015 04:23:24.0269] [2] Beginning processing Set-EnvironmentVariable
[09-15-2015 05:47:29.0408] [2] Ending processing Set-EnvironmentVariable

• Marked as answer by rasmusw 30 minutes ago