Today’s post comes from a recent experience we had as we were rebuilding one of our servers.

The Symptom

We were building the server from scratch and had just deployed SQL Server 2012 with SP1. As we were installing our application on the server, the installation failed with an error that another installer was running in parallel (which did not appear to be the case since the server was restarted before the installation began).

Upon further research, we found that:

• Two (2) instances of the MSIEXEC process were running – one for our installer under the user context, and another under the SYSTEM context in the background
  
• In addition to NGEN errors, the following error was being logged in the Event Viewer repeatedly:

Detection of product ‘{A7037EB2-F953-4B12-B843-195F4D988DA1}’, feature ‘SQL_Tools_ANS’ failed during request for component ‘{6E985C15-8B6D-413D-B456-4F624D9C11C2}

The hunt started for the infrastructure team who had originally built the server and installed SQL Server. Although they did find the CPU spiking to 100% occasionally during the post-install configuration, none of them could recall anything unusual during the installation.

The Resolution

After a couple of hours of troubleshooting (and lots of coffee), we came across an MS Connect item (#770630) that propelled us towards the solution to our problem. It appears that this was an issue with the original SQL Server 2012 SP1 package. According to the related KB2793634, “This issue occurs because the SQL Server 2012 components reference mismatched assemblies. This behavior causes native image generation to fail repeatedly on certain assemblies. Therefore, a repair operation is initiated on the installer package.”

The resolution to this issue is:

• If you already have SQL 2012 SP1 installed, deploy the Cumulative Update CU2 for SQL 2012 SP1 (KB2790947) OR
  
• If you downloaded SP1 through MSDN/TechNet, the source ISO has now been fixed. Hence, download the SQL Server 2012 SP1 ISO again and re-install the product

Reference:

• MS Connect #770630 [msiexec.exe processes keep running after installation of SQL Server 2012 SP1]: Link
  
• KB2793634 [Windows Installer starts repeatedly after you install SQL Server 2012 SP1]: Link
  
• KB2790947 [Cumulative Update 2 for SQL 2012 Service Pack 1]: Link
  
• SQL Server Build Lists: Link

Until we meet next time,

Be courteous. Drive responsibly.