SharePoint 2016 Central Admin - System Settings - Manage Farm Solution

When you click on the "Manage Farm Solution" link, you will land on the Solution Management page. This page gives an option to the SharePoint Administrator to manage the solutions which are deployed to farm level, or you can deploy new solutions also. If no solution is deployed to the farm, then you will get this page.

Or if some solutions are deployed to thefarm, then you will get something like this.

Manage Farm Solution page’s direct link - /_admin/Solutions.aspx

In the 1^st part of this article, (SharePoint 2016 Central Admin - System Settings - Manage Farm Solution - Part One), we learned how to view the properties of a solution, and what properties are available. In this article, we are going to explore what other options are available.

On the Solution Management page, we can deploy a solution to the web applications or we can retract solutions from a web application. But there is a big catch, we cannot add a new solution via Central Admin. We have to use PowerShell for this. Add-SPSolution is the command which we can use to add the solutions to the farm. We can also remove the solution from the farm completely.

Note

This way, we can only deploy solution but cannot activate the features. For that, we have to use the PowerShell enable-spfeature commands.

To deploy a Solution

In this section, we will walk through the steps for deployment of a solution “boostsolutions.sharepointclassifier.platform16.2.wsp” to all the web applications.

Login to Central Admin with account member of farm administrator group and also local admin on the server.
Go to the System Settings > Manage Farm solutions.
On this page, you will see “sharepointclassifier.platform16.2.wsp” solution’s status is not deployed.
Click on the name of the solutions
On Solution Properties page, you have to click on the Deploy Solution.
On Deploy Solution, please provide the following information.
1. Name - make sure you click on the correct solutions.
2. Deployment Status - double check the status.
3. Deploy When - we can control what time this solution deploys to the web application. i.e. In our case, we select "Now".
4. Deploy to - We can select to which web application this solution is deployed. It can be all content Web applications or Central Admin or single web application; however, we select All Content Web applications.
5. Click OK.
It will take awhile to deploy the solution and you will see the status of the solutions like this.

Note

If your farm is big or heavily used, then you will see the status deploying and taking a while for completely deploying it. It will also reset IIS so plan it in low peak hours.

To Retract a Solution

In this section, we will walk through the steps for retraction of a solution “boostsolutions.bulkpropertieseditor16.3.wsp” to all the web applications, then remove it from farm.

Login to Central admin with account member of farm administrator group and also local admin on the server.
Go to the System Settings > Manage Farm solutions.
On this page, you will see “bulkpropertieseditor16.3.wsp” solution’s status is deployed.
On this page click on the name of the solutions

On Solution Properties, Click on the Retract Solution
On Retract Solution Page, please select the following details,
1. Make sure correct name is selected.
2. You can also see the Deployed to status, on which web applications this solution deployed.
3. Also, check the deployment status.
4. Retract When - you can select a time when this solution will be retract or we can select “Now”. I.e. in our example is Now
5. Retract From - You can select a single web applications or All content Web Applications. I.e. we select All Content Web Applications
6. Click OK
On Solution Management page, we will see the Status Change to Retracting (Scheduled at 3/15/2017 7 -55PM).
We refresh page and the status changes to -
After couple of minutes (It does the IIS reset automatically), we will see the status is not deployed.
Now, the solution is completely retracted.
Click on the Solutions Name.
On the Solution Properties page, click on "Remove Solution".
Click OK on the warning message
It will bring us back to the Solution Management section but the solution is completely removed from the farm.

This concludes the series of Solutions Management. In this article, we learned how to deploy a solution to web applications, then retract a solution, then completely remove it from farm.

Keep learning and enjoying SharePoint.