LCS and Windows Server 2003 R2 known issue

As you might know Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 is now supported on Windows Server 2003 R2 and SQL Server 2005 SP1. Besides SQL 2005 SP1 it is also a requirement that you install the hotfix documented in KB911996 (Note the quirky installation procedure and that uninstall equals reinstall of LCS!!).

This time I was scripting the complete installation of LCS using LcsCmd and LCServer.msi (It's way easier to document, than "screenshooting" the GUI installation) and I also had a clustered SQL 2005 installation as a Backend Server.

After the installation I wanted to launch the LCS MMC on the Enterprise Edition front-end server, but it only presented me a window with the orange "Live Communications Server 2005" logo on top and a text in the middle "Live Communications Server 2005" - but no navigation pane.

I suspected it was either the scripted installation or SQL 2005 SP1 that was causing the problem, so this was where my trobleshooting efforts went. Two hours and a keyboard later I tried to open the MMC snap-in and manully add the Live Communications Server snap-in and voila, the navigation pane was back ;-)

I later chatted with one of my few contacts at Microsoft that really know LCS (You know who you are - and I'll keep my promise ;-) and was told that this was a "known issue", which they are investigating (Which is fine with me - since that means that my clustered SQL installation and installation scripts work as expected).