Symptoms
When you install patches on an instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2014 or 2016 that contains lots of databases, the setup may fail. And you may receive the following error message:
Microsoft.SqlServer.Configuration.SqlEngine.SqlEngineConfigException: Failed to shutdown the instance with process ID xxxx. Error encountered:
Microsoft.SqlServer.Configuration.Sco.ScoException: The service cannot accept control messages at this time.
Additionally, the SQL Server instance is left in a "Stopped" status.
Cause
This issue occurs because during the SQL Server patches installation, it will try to restart SQL Server service to apply the patch. However, if the SQL Server takes long time to terminate itself, setup will fail.
Note If there are many databases (such as, 300~1000 or more) and SQL Server is configured to use large amount of memory (such as, 20 GB~2 TB), SQL Server may take time to do clean shutdown of each database, and the patch setup may fail because SQL Server takes very long time to shutdown itself.
Resolution
This issue is fixed in the following cumulative updates for SQL Server:
Cumulative Update 5 for SQL Server 2016 RTM
Each new cumulative update for SQL Server contains all the hotfixes and security fixes that were included in the previous cumulative update. Check out the latest cumulative updates for SQL Server:
Note After you apply this fix, the patch setup program will wait for SQL Server to stop up to 30 minutes. If more than 30 minutes SQL Server is still stopping, patch setup may still fail.
Status
Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.
Reference
Learn about the terminology Microsoft uses to describe software updates.
