Issue with Activating a SharePoint Enterprise License and the Enterprise Features in Central Admin

I recently ran into an issue with a customer in a multi-server SharePoint farm (1 SQL server, 1 WFE, 1 APP server), where applying an Enterprise license was not going as easily as it should.  Under normal circumstances, when you have a SharePoint server that is presently licensed for the “Standard feature set”, upgrading to Enterprise is as simple as going into Central Admin, and under “Upgrade and Migration” choosing “Enable Enterprise Features”.

Unfortunately, on this customer, I was encountering the following issue (found in the event logs).

Failed to upgrade SharePoint Products.

An exception of type Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPUpdatedConcurrencyException was thrown. Additional exception information: An update conflict has occurred, and you must re-try this action. The object SPUpgradeSession Name=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx was updated by domainuser, in the PSCONFIG (10056) process, on machine SERVER. View the tracing log for more information about the conflict.

Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPUpdatedConcurrencyException: An update conflict has occurred, and you must re-try this action. The object SPUpgradeSession Name=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx was updated by domainuser, in the PSCONFIG (10056) process, on machine SERVER. View the tracing log for more information about the conflict.

Which is similar to the issue reported in this blog post.

The first thing I tried to do was simply run the Products Configuration Wizard on each server.  The result of which was a successful run on each server, but after retrying the upgrade, it still failed with the same message above.

After much (more) pain, once I finally came across the above blog post, it had several good suggestions.  The first (and simplest – should work most of the time) was to clear the SharePoint Timer Cache.  To do this, follow this other blog post of mine.  Unfortunately, that didn’t solve my problem (or theirs either).  They made other suggestions, which I investigated, but they ultimately weren’t successful either.

Solution

However, as suggested in that same blog post (above), I did go ahead and try to update the CU of the farm.  Once I did that, the farm came completely back into alignment with itself, and I was finally able to upgrade the farm to the Enterprise license (and then apply the Enterprise features as well).