Project Server 2010 on Windows 7 – An update

By blurg64

A while back I posted about getting the Project Server 2010 beta to run on Windows 7. Whilst this wasn’t an officially supported scenario, it was possible. Fast forward to the Release Candidate and it seems that MS have introduced a check that will stop the install happening on any Windows client 🙁

Thanks to a comment by Aric, I tried installing both the SharePoint and Project Server release candidates on a Windows 7 x64 virtual machine. Whilst SharePoint 2010 installed fine, Project Server threw a ‘Windows Server Features or Role Services required by this product are not enabled’ error:

Project Server 2010 Setup Error on Windows 7

After checking through the event log, and making sure I had all the pre-requisites installed, I then dug in to the temporary log files the set up program creates, and found this telltale entry in the file:

Start C:\Windows\system32\ServerManagerCmd.exe -whatif -inputpath C:\Users\EPMSOU~1\AppData\Local\Temp\PRE1.tmp.XML

Error: Failed to start process for file: C:\Windows\system32\ServerManagerCmd.exe arguments: -whatif -inputpath C:\Users\EPMSOU~1\AppData\Local\Temp\PRE1.tmp.XML ErrorCode: 2(0x2). Failed to run command C:\Windows\system32\ServerManagerCmd.exe with argument -whatif -inputpath C:\Users\EPMSOU~1\AppData\Local\Temp\PRE1.tmp.XML.

Windows Server 2008 Features or Role Services check failed.

It seems that the Project Server 2010 installer now has a hard coded call to ServerManagerCmd.exe an executable only present in the Windows Server SKU, which has basically stopped the ability to run Project Server 2010 on top of Windows 7. I guess we are all going to have to get used to running Windows Server 2008 R2 for local development.