Windows Server 2016’s November 2018’s Cumulative Quality Update, bringing the OS version to 14393.2639, offers a fix for an issue with Group Policy and a fix for an issue you might be experiencing on your Windows Server 2016-based Domain Controllers.

About Windows Server 2016 Updates

Microsoft issues two major updates each month for Windows Server 2016, as outlined in the Patching with Windows Server 2016 blogpost.

On the second Tuesday of each month (Patch Tuesday) Microsoft issues a cumulative update that includes security and quality fixes for Windows Server 2016. Being cumulative, this update includes all the previously released security and quality fixes.

In the second half of each month (generally the 3rd week of the month) Microsoft releases a non-security / quality update for Windows Server 2016.  This update, too, is cumulative and includes all quality and security fixes shipped prior to this release.

Group Policy

The November 2018 Quality Update  for Windows Server 2016 addresses an issue that prevents domain controllers from applying the Group Policy password policy when the minimum password length is configured to be greater than 14 characters.

Active Directory Domain Services

The November 2018 Quality Update  for Windows Server 2016 addresses an issue that causes promotions of non-root domains to fail with the error, “The replication operation encountered a database error.” The issue occurs in Active Directory forests that have optional features like Active Directory recycle enabled.

As you might recall, this issue was first discovered and described here.

Call to action

When you experience any one of these issues, you are invited to install Windows Server 2016’s November 2018’s Cumulative Quality Update (KB4467684) on your Active Directory Domain Controllers to resolve them.

Known Issues

After you install the August Preview of Quality Rollup or September 11, 2018 .NET Framework update, instantiation of SqlConnection can throw an exception.

After installing this update, users may not be able to use the Seek Bar in Windows Media Player when playing specific files. This issue does not affect normal playback.

When features related to end-user-defined characters (EUDC) are used, the entire system may become unresponsive.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM)-managed workloads are noticing infrastructure management issues after VMM refresh as the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) class around network port is being unregistered on Hyper-V hosts.