OP, ignoring the MMO part of it, do you work in IT, or in a data center? I hate when someone whines about work but has no understanding of what is involved. The hardware upgrades significantly changes the scope of the maintenance. Our last project to upgrade infrastructure, which just added 2 enclosures and 16 blade servers took 8 hours. And that doesn't even include building out the virtual servers. That is simply, rack, stack, cable, and configure network access. A legit data center is not your moms basement. Work has to be done with pristine care.

I am not a software guy but i assume configuring OS, virtual servers and any database replication would take quite a bit longer. And after that, then you can actually apply the patch, which probably would only be 6-8 hours.