To all of you who are used to building your own VM images for SharePoint and want to try “the latest and the greatest” such as building an image for SharePoint on Windows 2008 with SQL 2008.
Inspired by “Best of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 for SharePoint Deployments “ session at SPC2008 presented by Joel Oleson and Bob Fox (by the way, IT WAS GREAT!)
Well, I’ve decided to built test image for SharePoint.
Installation of Windows Server 2008 went smoothly. As I always did before, I configured it as Domain Controller and finished the rest of the steps.
The SQL 2008 installation was aborted though with the following message “Database Engine failed to install”.
Very puzzling at first… It seems that if run DCPromo to make your image a Domain Controller (creating a new Domain) prior to the Installation of SQL, installation of SQL will fail.
What I have found is that if you install SQL 2008 without having DC role for the server, the installation went very well. Then I assigned the DC role to the server running dcpromo.
Installation of SharePoint ran normally and now I have a new image!
The moral is change your install sequence!