System Center 2012 Unified Installer – Step by Step – Part 1

With System Center 2012 Microsoft released another tool called System Center Unified Installer. The System Center Unified Installer is design to do an automated installation of all the System Center 2012 products in Demo or Lab environments. It is not designed to install System Center 2012 in productive environments, because most of the time you have to work on the existing infrastructure and you change things on productive systems which you should do manually and check if they work as expected.

• System Center 2012 Unified Installer – Step by Step – Part 1
• System Center 2012 Unified Installer – Step by Step – Part 2
• System Center 2012 Unified Installer – Step by Step – Part 3

But it is a good tool to deploy System Center for demos, testing and proof of concepts. Because it can install all System Center 2012 components in less than three hours fully automated. Still you have to do some preparation of the environment and your target servers.

In this series of posts I will show you how you can deploy System Center with the System Center Unified Installer with less effort as possible.

In part one of this blog series the focus will be the pre-requirements and the sources for a deployment with System Center Unified Installer.

1. Download the System Center 2012 Suite. If you don’t have a license yet you can download the Private Cloud Evaluation Software.
2. Download the following Prerequisites
   

   Prerequisite	For
   Microsoft .NET Framework 4	SCAC SCCM SCDPM SCOM SCO
   Report Viewer Redistributable 2008	SCOM SCSM
   Report Viewer Redistributable 2010	SCOM
   Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2	SCAC SCCM SCDPM SCOM SCO SCSM SCVMM
   Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Native Client	SCVMM SCAC
   Windows Automated Installation Kit	SCVMM SCAC
   Microsoft Analysis Management Objects	SCSM
   Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Command Line Utilities	SCVMM SCAC
   SP1 for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2	SCCM
   Cumulative Update Package 4 for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1	SCCM

3. Now as the last step you have to unpack System Center 2012 and the prerequisites to your installer Computer. I created a Source Folder with the subfolders SC2012 for all the System Center Products and a subfolder Prereq for all the Prerequisites.
   So of the downloads you have to uncompressed using the command <filename>.exe /x:C:\Source\Prereq\<software>
   For example:
   – SQL Server 2008 R2
   – SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1
   – SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU4
   – System Center App Controller

Now this was step one of the preperation. In the next part I will write about how you have to setup the Installer and the Target servers.

Links for the Unified Installer:

• User’s Guide for System Center 2012 – Unified Installer
• German post about to setup SCUI by Michel Lüscher