Exchange 2010 SP2 to SP3 Org Prep error

At home I run an Exchange 2010 Server for my personal emails. I also use it for testing scripts and other features in Exchange. Recently I’ve been involved in quite a few Exchange 2013 designs/deployments and decided that I needed to upgrade my home server as well. Since my server was running SP2 I knew I needed to install SP3 in order for the upgrade to Exchange Server 2013 RTM CU1 to work.
I’ve installed SP3 on dozens of servers and have seen all sorts of errors, except for the one I encountered on my home Exchange server. When I ran the upgrade all the prereq checks were good and the install began, starting with the Organizational Preparation step. That’s when I received this error:


What the? Seems like a pretty cryptic error until you actually read it line for line. Pay specific attention to this area here:

This tells us that one of my groups, specifically the “Microsoft All Hosted Organizations” group is set wrong and needs to be fix. Well, lets go to AD Users and Computers to see what’s up with the group. Once in ADUC you need to go to Microsoft Exchange Security Groups OU (might need to click on View –> Advanced Features to view the OU). Then open the groups properties to see what’s up:

In my case, the group is set to Universal and not Global. Once I set the group to Global and click OK, my install went flawlessly:

Hopefully this helps anyone else looking for information on this particular install error.
Related Resources
Security Guide References the group