Unable to install Microsoft Windows Server 2012 into a VMware ESXi 5.x or Hyper-V virtual machine with HP provided media

Symptom

When users try to install Microsoft Windows Server 2012 using HP provided media into VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1 managed virtual machine or under Microsoft Hyper-V, the Windows Installer will pop-up a window with the following message:

Debug Assertion Failed! Program: x:\tools\BIOSCHECK64.exe File: c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\atlmfc\include\atlsmpstr.h Line:112 Expression: nRefs !=0 For information how your program can cause an assertion failure, see the Visual C++ documentation on asserts. (Press Retry to debug the application)"

Users can click on the Ignore button to continue with the installation.

Affected configurations

The system is configured with at least one of the following:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2012, any service pack
• VMware ESXi 5.0 Update 1, Update 2
• VMware ESXi 5.1, any Update

This tip is not system specific.

This tip is not option specific.

Note: This does not imply that the network operating system will work under all combinations of hardware and software.

Workaround

It is recommended to use the retail media rather than HP provided media to install Microsoft Windows Server 2012 into a virtual machine to prevent the warning.

If it is necessary to use HP provided media to install Windows Server 2012 to a virtual machine, the user can do the following:

• For Hyper-V, the user can just ignore the warning message and go on with the installation
• For VMware, the user can just ignore the warning message and go on with the installation or follow the instructions below to configure the virtual machine to reflect host System Management Basic Input/Output System (SMBIOS) structure to fix the issue.

Either of the following two (2) methods can do the work:

• Edit the virtual machine's .vmx file to contain the following line:

SMBIOS.reflectHost = "true"