Yesterday our offices were closed so we took the opportunity to do some long needed updates to Arena, and other parts of the network. We had a long list and got through about 2/3 of it.

We upgraded our VMWare ESXI server from 4.0 to 4.1 and that went great, nice and easy.

We upgraded our Windows Server to 2008 R2 SP1 and that went surprisingly smooth. Took forever, but went smooth.

We then upgraded SQL Server to 2008 SP1. We thought that was the latest, somehow we missed both SP2 and R2, oh well.

Installed Arena 2010.2.100 without issues (again quite a surprise) and the 2010.2.300 patch.

The last successful thing we did was to change the Arena Theme to the new “darker” theme.

Next we tried to remove Active Directory as it has caused us nothing but grief and isn’t actually required by Arena even though we were told it was. The grief continues. We uninstalled AD just fine, but apparently any services installed LOCALLY with authentication that only applies to the LOCAL machine is still stored in AD (if it exists) so when that was removed a bunch of stuff stopped working, like SQL Server. We got everything all fixed up except one thing, some stupid OLAP thing that can’t be found anywhere.  After 3 hours of fighting it we rolled back to just before we ripped out AD and decided we’ll just re-install the OS from scratch, it would be far easier and quicker.

We also tried doing the actual SQL Server 2008 R2 upgrade and that failed due to the OLAP issue, which was the last straw to rolling back to before the AD removal.  Why Microsoft makes things so difficult I don’t know, but the more I use anything more than the “basic OS” the more I am happy we use Mac and Linux for everything except what we absolutely have to (Arena runs on Windows, HVAC runs on windows and that is it).

As I said, all in all we got a lot done, but we were hoping to get AD ripped out as that would make future upgrades and maintenance times MUCH easier to do. We’ve been on Arena/Windows for just over 2 years and I have installed Windows Server on our production machine 4 times already, soon to be 5. And I’m not talking about upgrades, I’m talking about clean installs here.  Not impressed with the resilience of Windows as a stable OS.