While running through a bunch of interoperability tests for VSAN, one of the products I deployed was VMware View 5.3.1. This required a bunch of virtual machines to be rolled out; one VM for my SQL Server database to support View Composer, another for View Composer itself and then finally another VM for View Connection Server (also known as the connection broker). It was during the install of View Connection server that I hit this issue:
Error 1720: There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A script required for this install to complete could not be run. Contact your support personnel or package vendor. Customer action VM_AdamLoadVdiSchemaPreReqs script error -2147024894, : Line 16, Column 1,
KB article 2055807 suggested that this was an issue which should be resolved by installing MS HotFix KB 948821. So we got this installed, rebooted, and of course, View Composer failed to install again. So we did some further investigation, and read the error messages (this always helps) and realized that the installer was barfing when it was updating the ADLDS role – Active Directory Lightweight Directory Service role. So we opened up the server roles, and found we didn’t have this role. Eh?
And then the penny dropped! The Guest OS (Windows 2008 R2 SP1) deployed in the VM was deployed as a web server and was not deployed with a full/datacenter edition. The web server setup does not include the ADLDS role. After changing the Guest OS deployment to a full/datacenter edition, we were good to go and View Composer completed its install successfully.