This SharePoint farm has pending upgrades error when running New-SPConfigurationDatabase for a new SharePoint 2010 installation

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We ran into this problem while setting up some test farms where we’d get an exception while running the powershell for New-SPConfigurationDatabase.  The exception simply mentions “This farm has pending upgrades error” and it would fail.  The funny thing is that it’s a new farm with no installation.  We had tested the script before and it was running fine.  So I tested running the wizard and it worked fine!

As it turns out, this new farm had one difference: the SharePoint 2010 bits were installed, but so where the Office Web Apps bits.  So we took another test environment that had the same base (SP2010 + Office Web Apps, no wizard/farm setup), and then I ran psconfig –cmd upgrade –inplace b2b –wait –force.  The command returned an exception but it did configure one setting – I reran the New-SPConfigurationDatabase after and it ran fine.

So if you script (PowerShell) an installation that has SP2010 + Office Web Apps, do run the psconfig command, except an exception, and move on with your script – it’ll run fine.

 

Maxime