Recently I encountered a small glitch while trying to install VMware’s vCenter 5.5.0b Server on a new VM with Windows Server 2012R2 on it. Now, this OS is not yet ‘certified’ by VMware for use, but it’s pretty close to Windows Server 2012, and they will support it soon enough, so why not use it? But, a quirk with the differences between Windows Server 2012 and 2012R2 prevents a successful installation. Read on to see how to fix this.

I gave the installer a go, and everything looked great until the vCenter Server installation began. Once we got through the options and into the actual installation, it just hung at the following point.

Strange. Let’s look at the installation log. The last entry in the installation log, located in the %TEMP% path for the logged-in user.

We see the file c:\windows\system32\ocsetup.exe being referenced as one of the last entries in the log file. A check examination shows that between the Windows Server 2012 and 2012R2 releases, Microsoft decided to remove this file from the default installation. 

Well, that’s not good. I checked another Windows Server 2008R2 server (no Windows Server 2012 available at the time) and found the file. 

If it’s dependent on this file, let’s just copy it over to the new Windows Server 2012R2 VM and see what happens. Sure enough, we re-ran the vCenter Server installation and it flew over this installation point and continued to install without another problem.

Success! VMware’s vCenter Server 5.5 is now installed on a Windows Server 2012R2 VM!