Last week, I was asked to create a bunch of VMware development/demo vm’s for the company I work for. These vm’s needed to have the following software installed: windows server 2008 sp2, vs2010 beta1, tfs 2010 beta, and office 2007 sp2. Even though I’ve never worked with VMware before or done a TFS2010 install, I figured this would be cake. I mean, I’m a fricken trained professional!!! What could possibly go wrong? Heh heh heh.
First, I created a windows server 2008 sp2 image without any problems. Installed visual studio 2010 beta1 without any problems. Cool. So far so good. First impressions of VMware are positive. Performance is good. Next comes the TFS 2010 beta install. Glancing through the install guide, it looked pretty straight forward for a simple one server deployment. First up, install SQLServer 2008 with the following features: Database Engine Services, Full-Text Search, Analysis Services, Reporting services, Client Tool Connectivity, and Management Tools – Basic. Everything installed just fine except for the Full Text Search feature. That one had a red “x” next to it.
After trying for a long time to get the Full Text Search feature installed, I noticed that I now couldn’t install anything on the server because an installation was already in place. Whaaaaaat??? Looking in the Task Manager, yup, there were two Windows Installer processes running (msiexec.exe). And one of them was eating up most of my CPU! Since at this time there should have been no installations going on, I figured maybe I just needed to reboot. Nope, that didn’t work either. After rebooting, the two Windows Installer processes were still there with one of them using most of my CPU. Next, I tried killing the process. That didn’t work either. After killing the 2 msiexec.exe processes, they would come back in about two seconds. Ok I thought, I’ll just go in and manually turn off the windows installer service. That didn’t work either. The stop button on the windows installer service was greyed out. Great! So now, I have a server with two random msiexec.exe processes running all the time, which prevented me from installing anything else on the server. And to add insult to injury, one of the msiexec.exe processes was maxing out my CPU!!! No amount of rebooting would fix this.
Anyway, to make a long story short, after spending ridiculous amounts of time trying to figure out what was wrong, I fixed this by reverting my vm back to a snapshot of just windows server 2008 with sp2. Then instead of installing vs2010 beta 1 first, and then SQL Server 2008, I installed SQL Server 2008 first. Everything installed fine. Then I installed the rest of the pieces of TFS without any problems and last, I installed Visual Studio 2010 beta 1. The rest of the installation went very easily without any hiccups.
So the moral of this story, if you need to have VS 2010 beta 1 and SQL Server 2008 with the Full Text Search feature, install SQL Server 2008 first, and then install Visual Studio 2010 beta 1.