Installing CRM 2011 on Windows Server 2012

I am in the process of trying to install CRM 2011 onto a Windows Server 2012 with SQL Server 2012. There are many blogs/posts on the subject so I won’t repeat those here. However, I ran into a problem which will likely be encountered by others. After doing all the front end work recommended by other blogs, I started my install. After accepting the End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) the install just seemed to hang or stall. The EULA window remained and nothing progressed. Looking in the setup log I found that the problem was failure to install the Visual C++ Runtime (Installation of Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime failed. Exit code: 5100. Result: Asia). A web search found the answer, provided by CRM Diva and fellow CRM MVP Donna Edwards. Actually she was addressing another problem but her fix suited my situation as well. The problem is that the CRM installation program tries to install the C++ Runtime because it doesn’t recognize the later version installed by Windows Server 2012. When it tries to install it, it fails. So we must uninstall the existing Visual C++ Runtime so the CRM install can install it. An additional wrinkle is that there are two versions of the Runtime, x86 and 64 bit so be sure to uninstall all existing versions of the Runtime before attempting to install CRM.

Now if I can only resolve the Reporting Server issue that is now preventing the install. I’ll let you know how that works out.