“You are making my point!”

If you have seen the above annoying error recently while installing some software packages (Azure SDK, BizTalk Adapter Pack, etc.) in a Virtual PC environment, you are not alone. This is due to an MSI bug, or so I was told. People have come up with all kinds of solutions, but the one that I have found out so far that consistenly works is the following.

Go to command line in elevated security mode, and type:

msiexec.exe -package MyPackage.msi -qr

This will basically run the installation package in quiet mode with reduced UI, and apparently circumvent the bug.

When configuring Windows Clustered BizTalk host, one very important resource that needs to be clustered as a prerequisite is the Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator, or MSDTC. Here are a few links to help troubleshooting MSDTC.

Troubleshooting Problems with MSDTC

Troubleshooting MSDTC with DTCPing

How to use DTCTester Tool

One of the most common errors that I have seen can be linked to the proliferation of virtual machine technology. People simply copy the virtual hard disk (vhd) file containing the base Windows OS, boot it up, and then install BizTalk server on it. Well, the problem is that the System security identifier (SID) created by Windows OS in this case is also simply replicated in this case. And this ID happens to be the token MSDTC uses to identify cluster nodes. With these numbers replicated across the cluster nodes, MSDTC will get confused and your distributed transactions will stop working.

Hence, it is very important to remember using the SysPrep tool to reseal your Windows OS images before installing any software. Using NewSID utility to regenerate new SID after the fact may work but it requires you reinstalling MSDTC. In my opinion it is best to do SysPrep prior to installing anything to ensure that your new OS is truly unique. This could prevent a lot of head-scratching at 3 o’clock in the morning. J

Here is a good article covering the subject of creating and configuring a two-node W2K3 cluster on Virtual Server. Due to the limitation of no SCSI support on Virtual PC, this would not work on VPC.

Oh, one other thing. If you are using IE8, make sure you turn on the “Compatibility View” setting when accessing the Virtual Server admin page. Otherwise you will get all kinds of JavaScript errors that virtually renders the admin page useless.