Hello,
A little article to start the week with. Mondays can't be boring!
While installing VMware Site Recovery Manager 5 installation on Windows 2008 R2 I was stuck with the following error at the very end of the install procedure : Failed to update Perl installation directories.
After two more unsuccessful attempts I turned out to my old pal Google who in turns redirected me to the following VMware KB Article.
It turns out that the issue is caused by the PERL installation which depends on the old-school 8.3 filename system. If this is disabled on your system, the installation will fail. You will have to browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem and change the value of registry key NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation to 0, followed by a restart your server.
The KB article also indicates that:
"After enabling this registry setting per the Microsoft article, we must first make sure the VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager installation folder ( %PROGRAMFILES%\VMware\VMware VCenter Site Recovery Manager or for 64-bit systems:%PROGRAMFILES(X86)%\VMware\VMware VCenter Site Recovery Manager) is removed before restarting the installer."
In my case, the installation rollback procedure took care of removing the folder, but you may want to double-check.
Enabling 8.3 filename creation helped me successfully install SRM 5.0, I hope it will be helpful to you too! As of now, I have not yet tested whether the registry key can be set back to 1 after the install completes. I will test this and update accordingly.
Have a nice week!
Max