Sometimes you don't run into problems until the day before you run a demo....
Case in point:
Two weeks ago as I was prepping to deliver an MCM course on BI that covered PerformancePoint and PowerPivot. I wanted setup a PowerPivot app server so that I could demo a few things.
Well, have you ever tried to run SP on a vm rig that is overburdened? Sure you have... what is the first thing you do? Shut down vms until you get your minimum working set. It's simple... don't need machine A, shut it down.
And that's where I faulted.
Typically, when installing PowerPivot, I've never had to shut down my farm to conserve resources. In the MCM lab, it made sense to not have all 6 machines in the farm running... well, I was proven wrong. My attempt to only run SQL, AD, CA, and the target app server failed.
Tip:
When installing PowerPivot, your entire farm needs to be up and running.
When the PowerPivot setup installs its solutions on the farm, it will wait some period (I forget the exact timeout value) for the deployment jobs to succeed. On completion, it keeps moving the setup process along.
Otherwise, if you don't have your entire farm up and running, SP does the right thing and leaves the deployment states as "Deploying" until all the machines come online and have a chance to process the timer job. PowerPivot does what it needs to do (wait for the "Deployed" status) and then errors out if the timeout is exceeded. Net result: your installation is out of whack.
Can you recover? Maybe, with a leaning towards no. I haven't spent enough time looking at this error case to figure out if you can recover/resume a PowerPivot installation. I took the short cut and moved on to a cleaner system.
More in the coming weeks about not scrimping on resources...
-Maurice