Installing Configuration Manager 2007 SP2 R2 on Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL 2008 SP1

Recently I’ve reinstalled my lab environment with the latest versions of:

• Windows Server 2008 (R2 x64)
• SQL Server 2008 (SP1 x64)
• Configuration Manager 2007 (R2 with Service Pack 2)

As I’ve ran into some issues while installing this configuration I thought it would be nice to share them with you. The installation I did (for lab purposes) was all on a single box. Of course this is not something you would do in production, so I’ve you are installing a distributed environment you need to configure the components below on different machines. Installation might be slightly different as well, but it will give you a general idea.

Installing Windows Server 2008 R2

While the installation of Windows Server 2008 R2 was pretty straightforward you need to configure some Windows components afterwards.

Basically you can follow the steps provided in this article, which include:

1. Add the Windows Deployment Services (WDS) role with default settings (do not configure WDS as ConfigMgr will do that later)

2. Add the IIS role with the following settings:

          a. Add ASP.Net Role. Accept defaults.

          b. Add ASP (required for ConfigManager Reporting Point to function)

          c. Add Windows Authentication

          d. Add Static Content

          e. Add IIS 6 Management Compatibility and all of the sub-components of it.

3. Add the Remote Differential Compression feature

4. Add the BITS Server Extensions feature

5. At step 5 things are starting to be a little bit different. In Windows Server 2008 R2 WebDAV is a component  which can be installed as part of IIS and no longer needs to be downloaded as a separate component.

Still the configuration of WebDAV remains the same as described here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc431377(TechNet.10).aspx (steps 4 and 5 under the section “Install and Configure WebDAV”).

Be sure to not only configure WebDAV but also Enable it (I forgot it :-))

Install SQL Server 2008 SP1
When you install SQL Server 2008 include following components:

• Database Engine Services (required for a Management Point)
• optional Reporting Services (required for a Reporting Services Point and as this will be the only reporting in future versions of ConfigMgr I chosen to install this as well)
• optional Management Tools Basic and Complete (I always like to have my SQL management tools available)

Install SQL 2008 SP1 when the installation finishes to upgrade to the current latest version.

Install Configuration Manager 2007 SP2.

If you want to install to a SQL 2008 Server you need to at least have an installation of Configuration Manager 2007 which includes Service Pack 1. I haven’t found a source that includes SP2, but if there is it will probably work as well.

Make sure that you have a full installation of Configuration Manager 2007 with SP1, because if you have the upgrade only source (for either SP1 or SP2) the installation actually starts but the Install a Primary Site is greyed out. You don’t get any warning that you are running an upgrade installation and you can’t judge by the size of the installation as well (about 1,4 Gb). It took me some hours of troubleshooting before I finally noticed I was using upgrade sources.

The installation of Configuration Manager 2007 SP1 didn’t give any surprises, but the upgrade of SP2 did. When the installation asks to download updates (or point to an existing folder) I pointed it to the folder of the SP1 updates that were download in that setup. However this results in an error:

"component manifest was not found or it was invalid"

I’m apparently not the only one who was stuck on this error, but there are several ways to get through this:

• Download on a different machine and supply the path to the SP2 installation (as I did)
• Download to a different folder (as I should have thought of :-))
• Move the ConfigMgr.manifest.cab and ccmsetup.cab to different folder as described here.

When the installation finishes you are running Configuration Manager 2007 SP2 which is version 4.00.6487.2000. Just install R2 to the Management Console and you are good to go running the latest versions of Windows, SQL and Configuration Manager.