FIM 2010 Reporting - Management Packs Fail to Deploy

I was working through an issue for a few hours yesterday and today and wanted to share my finding and solution.

In short, I was running a change install on the FIMService/Portal as we needed to add reporting. The installer would make it to the piece where it was deploying management packs, and would then perform a rollback.

In order to do this, I had to run msiexec with the appropriate switches and provide a location for the logfile.

msiexec /I "Service and Portal.msi" /l*v InstallLog.log (this creates a log in the same directory as the installer).

The log files can get very large (especially for FIMService and with a verbose switch usually run around 2MB).  2MB worth of text is a tremendous amount and can be very tedious to wade through.  What I've found with FIM is that searching for "InstallFinalize" is a good way get started looking for the failure

The log file eventually led to the error below:

CustomAction ImportRequestHistoryReportManagementPackBundle returned actual error code 1603 (note this may not be 100% accurate if translation happened inside sandbox).

Essentially, the failure was occurring due to a timeout when trying to import the Management Packs to the SCSM 2012 server.

The solution in this case was to manually import the management packs and re-run the install change. 

I won't go into the details on how to import management packs in this article.  A reference is available at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh524269.aspx.

One piece that I needed was the location of the management pack bundles.  These can be found in the FIM installation media in the following directory Portal and Service/Program Files/Forefront Identity Manager/2010/Reporting/Reports. The management pack bundles will have a .MPB extension which can be loaded manually into Service Manager.

In my specific case, I found this bypassed the timeout error in the installation and allowed me to successfully install reporting.

Hopefully it can help someone else too!