SCOM 2007 R2 Installation error “Microsoft sql 2005 Server 2005 Service pack 1 or higher not found”

This past week I was doing an install of SCOM 2007 R2 on a Windows 2008 R2 Server with a SQL 2008 SP1 cluster hosting the OperationsManager database. During the deployment of the OperationsManger database on the SQL 2008 cluster we came across the error below during installation. We spent quite some time trying to find why we would be getting an error mentioning we did not have SQL 2005 SP1 installed since we were running SQL 2008 SP1 with CU 8 installed.  

So we checked the installation log found in %temp% and found no leads other then the error in the screen shot above. So we ran Process Monitor and noticed a failed call to \\SQLClusterName\PIPE\winreg which was the virtual name of the cluster we were running the installation on.  We also ran Debugview and noticed the same call "00000135 43.59947586 [14564] SetSqlProperties: RegConnectRegistry failed to connect to remote reg. Error Code: 0x80070035. \\SQLClusterName”. After doing some digging we were able to track this down to a missing registry value. The value below is used to remap named pipe calls to the current active node of the cluster. So in our case when the installer made a call the registry to check the SQL version the call failed.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters, we should normally have the key:

Name:                          NoRemapPipes

Type:                            REG_MULTI_SZ

Data:                             winreg   svcctl eventlog

So to fix this you will needed to add this registry value on each node. Keep in mind that the values are entered on separate lines. We noticed that you do not need to reboot the node for this to take effect.  Like always make sure to backup your registry before making changes to your production servers.