As many of you know, Microsoft has a super-duper-fantastic (and free) VPC that you can download with all of our BI goodness pre-installed and configured. It’s called the “AllUp BI” VPC, and if you want more details, do a bit of reading here.

I use this image as a primary demo platform and have 3-4 different “hacked” versions of it on various machines I run. Because it is a totally self-contained system, this server acts as its own domain controller, which is a problem as far as PerformancePoint Server is concerned. PPS doesn’t support being installed on a DC, even though you can get it to work anyway.

I discovered yesterday that if you do install PPS on a DC, you’re going to run into problems getting service packs and hotfixes installed, too.

When attempting to deploy a particular hotfix I needed, the distro threw this error:

Failed package requirement analysis

Thanks to a couple guys here at Microsoft who reminded me that AllUp is a DC and offered a workaround, I was able to get back up and rolling quickly. Essentially, you’ll just need to run the .msp which is complaining from the command-line with a parameter that tells it to skip prerequsiste checking.

I’m my case, PPLSrv.msp /SKIPREQCHECK=1 did the trick.