Adding Web Front Ends? Be at the same code base!
If you are adding web front ends to a farm, be sure your app server and web front ends are at the same code base or you may experience failures trying to run the SharePoint Configuration Wizard. Our farm had hotfixes 313243 and 316200 applied to the application server. After some significant testing of the app server to make sure the sites we were migrating to the new server farm worked, Nelson and I attempted to add a pair of web front servers to what was supposed to be the standard 5 server SharePoint farm. However, we kept getting the following errors:
Event Type: Error
Event Source: SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard
Event Category: None
Event ID: 104
Description:
Failed to connect to the configuration database.
An exception of type System.Security.SecurityException was thrown. Additional exception information: Access denied.
System.Security.SecurityException: Access denied.
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPPersistedObject.Update()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPServer.Update()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFarm.Join()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.ConfigurationDatabaseTask.CreateOrConnectConfigDb()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.ConfigurationDatabaseTask.Run()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.TaskThread.ExecuteTask()
The Zone of the assembly that failed was:
MyComputer
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
After a little testing to make sure that the service account we were attempting to use was correct and had access to the configuration database, we realized that the problem must not be that the user did not have access to the database, but that the database structure was different from what the config tool was expecting. After running the hotfixes on our new WFE servers, everything seemed to work as originally expected.