By John Ballard (posting on his behalf)
We are receiving numerous reports of people having problems with the CTP2 release of Service Provider Foundation (SPF). The cause is simple but quite inconvenient: the setup routine’s prerequisite checker is not accurate and gives a false positive result. This allows SPF to install successfully even though it will not end up in a functional state because of missing prerequisites. This happened because we switched operating systems between the CTP1 and CTP2 releases, specifically from Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2012, and the latter has more secure defaults for server roles and features. So, where CTP1 setup only had to check, for example, that IIS was enabled on Windows Server 2008, CTP2 needs to check specific sub-features of IIS (some of which are now off by default) on Windows Server 2012, which it does not do, unfortunately.
We did provide release notes on this, but decided we should also blog about it because people don’t always review the release notes *prior* to laying down bits. (I shouldn’t be surprised, it is often only after I encounter a problem that I think to myself “hmmmm…I wonder if there is something about this in the release notes…”)
The following table describes the prerequisites in detail. The first items are pretty straightforward, they are either installed or not. The tricky details are captured in the bottom four rows dealing with Windows Server roles and features:
Required Software for Computers Running Service Provider Foundation
Software
Location
Notes
Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate
Service Provider Foundation web server
Operating System
PowerShell 3.0
Scripting services
SQL 2008 R2 or later
Database server
Database services
System Center 2012 SP1 CTP2 VMM console
Review the VMM Console System Requirements (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=246069).
VMM CTP2 is required.
Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5:
· Web Server
· Security
· Basic Authentication
· Windows Authentication
· Application Development
· .NET Extensibility 3.5
· .NET Extensibility 4.5
· ASP.NET 3.5
· ASP.NET 4.5
· ISAPI Extensions
· ISAPI Filters
· Management Tools
· IIS Management Scripts & Tools
Enable using Server Manager on the SPF Web Server
Application Server:
· Microsoft .NET 4.5
.NET Framework 4.5 Features:
· WCF Services
· HTTP Activation
Windows Process Activation Service:
· Process Model
· Configuration APIs
Everyone is strongly encouraged to go through this entire list, including a pass through Server Manager roles and features add/remove, to ensure each of the prerequisites is installed and enabled.