One question I get asked a lot from customers is around
patching their SharePoint environments.  
In general you were always able to install the bits on all your servers
in any order you felt like going.. the real question or issue I have found is
the completion step which is running the Configuration Wizard.    Some customers went so far as to run the
installer to load the bits on their boxes but may have only run the
Configuration Wizard on one box… or in some cases maybe in a larger farm they
simply omitted a box.. this puts your environment at risk.   

In SharePoint 2010 I still like to hit my main server that’s
running CA first with Config Wizard (or PSCONFIG if you choose that
method)   But there is nothing stopping
you from going to the other boxes and kicking off the Config Wiz while the
other is running…. What will happen is that the other boxes will go into a
locked state for the upgrade.   Once one
box completes the others will in sequence of starting the Config Wiz run
through the 10 step upgrade.    As you can see in the screenshot below this
particular box is waiting for the lock to release to continue.

 
 
  
  
 The one real take away I need to make is to ensure in a multi-server environment you run this on each server.  

Building a brand new SharePoint 2010 Environment?   Want to decrease some of the time for making
sure your environment is up to date with regards to versioning?    Slipstream your build.

In the following section I am going to detail how I build my
slipstreams… there are other posts out there that will be similar and may even include
shortcuts such as posting the bits directly to the update folder but I like to
be a little more hands on and in reality it does not take a lot of effort.  

New Environment

Download the SharePoint 2010 RTM Bits  (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/ee388573)

I shorten the name of the downloaded file before I begin to
something like SP10.exe and SFSSP1  this
will make it a bit easier on the typing.

Download the SP1 Bits. 

Although technically not necessary I will still download and
incorporate both the SharePoint and the SFS SP1 Bits into my slipstream.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26623 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2460058

Same as with the RTM bits… I will shorten the names of these
files to help with typing.  SFSP1.exe and
OFFSP1.exe

Download the CU’s

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2536599

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2553931

Lets get busy

So this was the hardest part of the operation.   What I do next is create four folders and extract the bits for each into them.

SP1 – Folder names    OFFSP1  
SFSSP1

Command I run:   sp1.exe /extract:c:\OFFSP1    (where sp1.exe is the renamed executable and OFFSP1 is the folder I created and am extracting to.

                             Sfssp1.exe /Extract:c:\SFSSP1

I will do this for the Cumulative Updates as well.  

Once this is complete the SharePoint 2010 Installation
folder has a folder called updates.   I
am simply going to copy and paste the contents of each of the folders I extracted
directly into Updates.  

This concludes the Slipstream procedure.    Once complete you can go forth and install.    Your environment will be up to date and you wont have to go through the process of individually installing
patches and then remembering if you hit every server in the process…  It happens (unfortunately very often)

Additional reference information can be found here at my buddy Spence’s site http://www.harbar.net/archive/2011/06/30/327.aspx