Install Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 on Windows Server 8 (Windows Server 2012)

[UPDATE - March 28, 2013] Microsoft has released support for Windows Server 2012 in its UR13 update. With the availability of UR13, you should NOT need to read this blog post in the case that you intend to use UR13+ as your development environment. If your plan is to not use the latest rollup but rather stay with a rollup prior to UR13, then you can still use the techniques in this blog post. [/UPDATE]

If you like to live on the edge, you might want to use Microsoft latest operating system for your development environment, such as Windows 8. At the same time as a CRM developer, you would probably also want to use a Windows server system as your development environment, so you don't have to use a virtual machine, which consumes more computing resource, and takes longer to start up.

If you have the above thought, you are not alone. I have the exact same thought, which is the reason I generally use Windows server system for my CRM development environment.

During the weekend, I started to build up a new development environment using my new Lenovo ThinkPad T520 laptop (Regrettably I bought a laptop with no touch screen, which you should avoid if you in the market for a new laptop). So my natural thought would be using Windows Server 8 (Update - May 31, 2012, Windows Server 8 is now called Windows Server 2012).

[UPDATE - Sep 8, 2012] I was able to use the same approach to install CRM on the final release version (aka RTM) of Windows Server 2012.

However until I started the actual installation, I didn't realize that Windows Server 8 is not supported by Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. Here are the procedure and a few hacks that I used to get the job done. 

1. Before you launch the CRM installation program, you should first install Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) using Server Manager
    
   It should be noted, you cannot install WIF using the download bits from Microsoft website, since they are not compatible with Windows Server 8. Also you cannot depend on CRM installation program to install WIF for you, it will always fail, since it basically tries to use the WIF installation package from Microsoft download site. You will always get "Installation failed" error, no matter how hard you click "Install" button in the following screen.
    
2. Secondly, you need to make sure that you have IIS installed first. You can do so by adding Web Server (IIS) role using Server Manager. If you don't have IIS installed, you will encounter the following error during the installation. Having IIS installed will save you this trouble.
   
3. Make a backup of svrmgrnc.dll file under your Windows System32 folder, since we are going to overwrite this file.
4. In order for you to be able to overwrite svrmgrnc.dll file under System32 folder, you need to take over ownership of the file. To do so, you need to find the file under System32 folder, right-click on the file, and choose Properties, then navigate to Security tab, choose Advanced button, then click Change.
   
5. Then you need grant yourself Write privilege, or Full Control privilege to svrmgrnc.dll file under System32 folder.
6. After you have made the proper changes to svrmgrnc.dll file, the next thing you need to do is to find the following four files from a Windows 2008 R2 system, and copy them to your System32 folder of your Windows Server 8 system.
• Microsoft.Windows.ServerManager.dll
• rmConfigHelper.dll
• ServerManagerCmd.exe
• svrmgrnc.dll
7. You can now start the CRM installation as usual.
8. During the installation process, you will be prompted the following error window, just click OK to continue.
   
9. As the installation goes further, you will run into another two errors, both are related to Windows Indexing Service which is no longer available for Windows Server 8. Those two errors will not affect the general CRM functionality, except CRM help search function, which I have never found myself in need of it anyway.
   Action Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Common.InstallHelpIndexesAction failed.
   Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {3BC4F3A1-652A-11D1-B4D4-00C04FC2DB8D} failed due to the following error: 80040154 Class not registered (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040154 (REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG)).
   
   
   Action Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Server.StartIndexingServiceAction failed.
   
   The specified service does not exist as an installed service


10. If you are as lucky as me, your CRM installation should finish with the following message.
    
11. After the installation is done, you should recover the svrmgrnc.dll file that you made the backup in step 2, and also you are now free to remove the other three files from System32 folder.

After all this is done, I had a Windows Server 2012 system with SQL Server 2012, Visual Studio 2012, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 installed on the same box. I am pretty happy with it.

You might be wondering why we need to replace those four files. The reason is, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 installation program uses a deprecated command line tool called ServerManagerCmd.exe to install and manage Windows features during the installation. ServerManagerCmd.exe depends on a few other libraries including rmConfigHelper.dll, svrmgrnc.dll, and Microsoft.Windows.ServerManager.dll.

Summary Notes

• This is not a supported approach, so you may or may not want to go this path depending on your development needs.
• CRM R8 is only inches away from the final release, you may want to wait for R8. There is a hope that CRM R8 might have Windows Server 8 support, which I am not sure at this moment yet. [UPDATE - May 10, 2012] CRM R8 is going to be RU9 (confusing enough? RU9=Rollup Update 9, R8=Release 8), which requires RU6. So in order to install R8, you need to first install RU6, so we don't have a way to install R8 on Windows Server 8 unless you use the hacks illustrated in this blog post. 
• For your convenience, I have uploaded the mentioned 4 files in a zip file to my Skydrive, so feel free to grab it if that saves you time, or you just don't have a Windows Server 2008 R2 system available to get those files. Unless you really trust me, you may not want to use the file. ;-)
• Use the hacks at your risk, I make no warranties of any kind.

Thanks for reading, hope this helps.

Error when applying CRM4 Update Rollup

I was recently trying to apply the latest CRM 4 Update Rollup 6 to my VPC, and I got the following error message:
Action Microsoft.Crm.UpdateWrapper.MspInstallAction failed.
This patch package could not be opened. Verify that the patch package exists and that you can access it, or contact the application vendor to verify that this is a valid Windows Installer patch package.

After I spent a few hours tweaking Windows registry with no success, I fixed the problem by using the following procedures:

1. Download Windows Installer Cleanup Utility from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301, and install it.
2. Run Windows Installer Cleanup Utility, choose Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server [4.0.7333.3], and remove it.
   
   Note: Windows Installer Clean Up Utility would not actually physically remove any files from your CRM server installation folder, nor your database files. It basically removes the registry entries related to your previous installation. It’s pretty safe to run this program.
3. Re-run CRM installation program.
• In "Specify Deployment Options" window, type the SQL Server’s name in the textbox and then choose "Connect to an existing deployment".
  
• In "System requirements" window, you will see a warning saying that "Setup might overwrite the existing files". It’s time to consider making a backup for all ISV files if you haven’t done so yet. After you have done the backup, you can click "Next" to finish the installation.
  
4. After you finish the installation and reboot your CRM server, you should be good to apply the update rollup now.

The entire process shouldn't take you more than 30 minutes.

A couple of issues that I encountered when installing CRM 4 client

I was trying to install CRM 4 Outlook Client on my VPC, and unfortunately (or luckily) ran into a couple of issues. I am just taking a note for future reference.

1. The installation package cannot install MSDE 2005, and it didn't give me enough information about what went wrong. I tried to run MSDE installation alone and it did give me a little more information by providing me a link to the log file. It turns out that my MSXML 6.0 parser was newer than what MSDE 2005 requires. Basically MSDE 2005 requires MSXML 6.0 without any service pack. My VPC has got MSXML parser 6.0 Service Pack 2 installed, and MSDE 2005 installation simply exits when it checks this software requirement. What I did was uninstall MSXML 6.0 Parser, and ran the CRM 4 client installation again, the problem was solved right away.
   
   Note: In such case, you can also try to find the detail errors by looking for MSDE installation log file. It's typically located in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Setup Bootstrap\LOG\Files folder.
   
   
2. I received an error saying "The path is not of legal form" when I try to specify the destination folder for my Outlook client.
   

Basically the solution has been provided here. What you need to do is to manually update the following registry:

Key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\
Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Products\059DD8CB00184F24E99A62CF4D6109FA\InstallProperties]
Name: InstallLocation
Data: “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics CRM”