Hi Stefan,
Any good article explaining the “zero downtime feature” you know of? Maybe a good one to have on this excellent blog. I’m still to find a decent explanation on it. Is it down to how the binaries are deployed? As long as we take the WFEs out of the NLB and use PowerShell/UI to stop services before installing patches on the other servers we don’t have downtime, i.e., if done properly and with care the “patch phase” doesn’t incur in downtime in 2010 and 2013 versions. What causes downtime is the “build-to-build upgrade”, specifically the database upgrade phase as you know better than me. SharePoint 2013 introduced a -UseSnapshot parameter on the Upgrade-SPContentDatabase commandlet which allows us to have the site collections online while it’s content database is upgraded (using a snapshot, i.e, a read-only mode) so we already had a “zero downtime patching” with SharePoint 2013 (as long as we used a SQL edition that supported snapshot of course). What’s new on SharePoint 2016 about this?
Sorry for the long post but I still couldn’t fully understand this.
Regards,
Marco