Installing PerformancePoint Server 2007 on a domain controller VPC

Last month I was attempting to install PerformancePoint Server Planning and Monitoring 2007 on a development virtual machine that I had promoted to a Domain Controller and the pre-requisite check kept failing with the below ambiguous message ”Failed Windows Server 2003 SP1 (non domain-controller)”. My OS was Windows Server 2003 SP2 and I just could not make sense of what was happening. As a consequence of failing this pre-requisite check, the ”Next” button was grayed out and I was stuck.

 

The easiest way to hack this pre-requisite check was by running the relevant MSI’s from command prompt with the SKIPREQCHECK argument set to true.

PerformancePoint Planning Server 2007
D:\> MSIEXEC /i PPLSrv.msi SKIPREQCHECK=1

PerformancePoint Monitoring Server 2007
D:\> MSIEXEC /i PSCSrv.msi SKIPREQCHECK=1

Launching the MSI this way ensures that the “Next” button is highlighted. I experienced no further issues with the setup on the VPC. Though Microsoft do not recommend installing the product on a Domain Controller, I needed to do it this way so I had a single, consolidated development VPC.