HMC4.5, Deployment Halted

I have started deploying HMC4.5 all over again for performance and scalability testing. I hit a new error message fairly early on in the deployment this time from the Provisioning Deployment Tool. The error appearer at the point I had completed all the settings for the Deploy Core MPS Components section and clicked Start Deployment. After a few seconds the following error message appeared -

Deployment Halted

Deployment interrupted for Mpf Audit And Recovery/MPS01 because SQL Server MPSSQL is either offline or non-existent

I attempted all the normal troubleshooting of ensuring IP connectivity, browsing, DNS records were all okay. Rebooted both servers, checked Event Logs and searched for *.log files, all to not result. After changing the following, it seemed to resolve the situation. I do not know enough about SQL to know if this is the fix, or if it was just some sort of coincidental timing...
On the SQL Database server, open the SQL Server Configuration Manager. Expand SQL Server 2005 Network Configuration > Protocols for MSSQLSERVER. Right click TCP\IP and select Enable. Restart the relevant SQL services. After completing this the Deployment finally continued without the above error.

(NB. I have changed the server names in the errors and post above)

HMC 4.5, Install and Configure the OOF Agent

Whilst installing HMC 4.5 I have now reached the Install and Configure the OOF Agent section. There are some minor details that upset my installation. After some searching of the internet I have realised there is literally no resource or documentation on the web about these components, so I have decided to blog todays findings. (Try entering CategorizerOverrideAgent into Google - I only got one website returned; Technet)

In the section when you install the CategorizerOverrideAgent.msi from the Service Provisioning\MPS\Install folder the instructions state that this should be installed in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\TransportRoles\Agents\CategorizerOverrideAgent directory. By default my installation always reverted back to Program Files (x86) not the Program Files folder. I tried to change this several times with no success. It turns out this is not an issue though.

During the steps of installing the categorizer agent via the Exchange Management Shell the steps are not quite in the correct order and some syntax is missing. Rather than just running the switch -AssemblyPath CategorizerOverrideAgent.dll you need to pass it the full path to the dll as the Exchange Management Shell does not know the location of CategorizerOverrideAgent.dll.

In my environment I was not able to run the Enable-TransportAgent CategorizerOverrideAgent cmdlet whilst the MSExchangeTransport service was stopped (as the instructions suggested). I had to start the MSExchangeTransport service, enable the CategorizerOverrideAgent and then restart the service.

Running Get-TransportAgent at the end showed that despite all these annoyances the Categorizer Agent is now installed and enabled on my Hub Transport server.

HMC 4.5, Exchange Resource Manager

I am working may way through deploying Hosted Messaging and Collaboration 4.5 (HMC 4.5). I have reached the point (with a lot of frustration and time consuming tweaks) of configuring Exchange 2007 SP1 Resource Management on the Microsoft Provisioning Engine server. Now if you follow the link here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc501402.aspx you would think this was a fairly straight forward task? Wrong...
So I changed the required values and entered my mailbox, my public folder mailbox and my Domain Controllers FQDN. When I ran the provtest command I received the following error;

errorContext description="Mail server not found"

After trying to troubleshoot this for quite some time it turns out that I made that mistake of using a FQDN. It seems that unless these values are NETBIOS names, the script will fail. Seems ridiculous to me. Hopefully this post might save someone else the time and frustation I spent on this daft issue.

Microsoft Provisioning Services, Locales

I am currently setting up the Microsoft Provisioning Services(MPS)components as part of the HMC4.5 installation for my Hosted Exchange POC. When attempting to assign some of the core MPS components to a server I received the following error message - The server xxxxx either does not exist, is offline or fails one or more prerequisite checks. Do you want to assign the server anyway? Now is that a cover-all error message or what!? When I click on details I found a much more explanatory reason, but a very frustrating one too

Exception: Microsoft.Provisioning.DeploymentTool.Engine.ServerPrerequisiteException
Message: Default server locale is 2057, should be one of: 1033

It turns out that Microsoft have only tested the MPS on the English (United States) locale only and therefore that is the only locale that I can install MPS onto! So after ensuring I had installed every locale configuration as English (United Kingdom) for my MPS servers, I now have to change them all back. Joy.

Side note - when you have changed all the locales on your servers to English (United States) you will need to close the Provisioning Deployment Tool and open it again. For some reason it still seemed to think the servers had the wrong default until the application was restarted.