I found myself playing with System Center Virtual Machine Manager over the past few weeks. After installing and configuring SCVMM 2019, I was tasked with performing an install of SCVMM 2022 rather than upgrading the 2019 install.
After uninstalling everything, clearing out the registry, and grabbing the SCVMM 2022 install media, I continued to run into errors while installing the VMM component. I received a 1603 error at the end of installation, but was pointed to the vmmServer.log file for more details.
In the log file, I found an error about creating a temporary file which caused the installation to fail. Specifically:
CAQuietExec: Microsoft (R) MOF Compiler Version 10.0.17763.1
CAQuietExec: Copyright (c) Microsoft Corp. 1997-2006. All rights reserved.
CAQuietExec: Parsing MOF file: C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center\Virtual Machine Manager\setup\VMMAgent.mof
CAQuietExec: C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center\Virtual Machine Manager\setup\VMMAgent.mof (1): error SYNTAX 0X8004402f: Error creating temporary file
CAQuietExec:
CAQuietExec: Error 0x80070002: Command line returned an error.
CAQuietExec: Error 0x80070002: QuietExec Failed
CAQuietExec: Error 0x80070002: Failed in ExecCommon method
CustomAction MofcompCarmineAgentMof returned actual error code 1603 (note this may not be 100% accurate if translation happened inside sandbox)I assumed that this might be a permissions error and that the service account I was using to install SCVMM didn’t have permissions on the C:\Windows\Temp folder. I made the service account an administrator on the machine hosting SCVMM and reran the setup – which still failed with the same error.
After some time, I realized that the install logs were referencing my user folder on the system. It turns out that %tmp% is not the C:\Windows\Temp folder, but instead is C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Temp. There I found tens of thousands of .tmp files, all of which were 0 bytes in size.
After deleting 65,535 .tmp files, I was able to successfully finish reinstalling SCVMM.