I've been trying to install Exchange 2010 SP3 for the past 5 hours and it appears as though the job is stuck on the "Mailbox Role" portion.
The server holds the CAS, HT and ET roles and had SP2 installed previously (no update rollups). The .edb file is about 310 GB on a VMWare box with 24 GB of RAM on a RAID 10 so it should be plenty fast.
All of the previous roles went quite fast but the Mailbox role has been about halfway through for 4 1/2 hours now. Occasionally the progress bar will flicker but it hasn't made any progress in that time.
Is this normal behavior? I'm not sure if the job is stuck or if Exchange is actually processing things. If the job is stuck is there any way to safely abort the installation?
I also had to wait several hours to complete the SP3 installation on our Exchange server, and our system is a pretty small one (however it has all roles on a single server). I remember when I performed the upgrade on ours that I was worried something had gone wrong, but after hitting google, decided the best plan was to hold tight, and give it plenty of time. I'm sure it will complete. I've seen some people report it taking as long as 6 hours.
I've managed to finally figure out what was plaguing my installation.
Upon locating the logs in C:\ExchangeSetupLogs I opened it to find that it was riddled with lines (about 7 hours worth) stating that the installer was unable to stop the MSExchangeIS service and that it would try again in 25000 seconds. I manually stopped the Exchange Information Store service and the installation proceeded.
After the reboot I needed to manually start the ExchangeIS service, however it appears to be working as it should. It's somewhat disappointing to me that there would be no feedback on the installation dialog stating what the problem was, or that the installer wouldn't safely fail after a threshold had been met with attempts to stop the MSExchangeIS service. For all I know this would have gone on indefinitely had I not taken the steps I did.