Update 2018-10-18 – Check out this comment. Looks like a much easier method than my MSI editing one.
Sick of the hotfix requirements for NetApp Host Utilities? Me to.
On a test/dev server I have I’ve been experimenting with Veeam, iSCSI, ReFS and Server 2016. I wanted to run the NetApp Host Utilities against my Server 2016 box and was told I was missing Q3197954:
Problem is this 2016 server is fully patched and if I go manually download Q3197954 (which appears to be a previous rollup) I can’t install it on my fully patch server.
On a hunch I figured I might be able to crack open the MSI and find a way around the hotfix check and I was right. Here is how you do it:
- Download and install Orca MSI Editor (Alternate Download)
- Download the NetApp Host Utilities package from https://now.netapp.com/ (v7.1 as of this writing)
- Launch Orca and open the MSI file with it
- Select ‘InstallUISequence’ on the left and then click the ‘Sequence’ column on the top right to sort by lowest value first
- Locate ‘CheckMSHotfixes’, right click on it and choose ‘Drop row’
- Click ‘Save’
- Close Orca
- Copy the edited MSI to your server and run the installation as per normal
Digging around the MSI a bit I found references to “IGNORE_HOTFIX_CHECK” listed. I suspect it’s some kind of flag or environment variable that could be set to accomplish the same thing but I was unable to find any documentation on how and a few guesses around using environment variables didn’t pan out so I decided to stick with the above solution.
A note of caution. This is likely 100% unsupported by NetApp and if they found out you did this to get the Host Utilities on your server you might run into support issues.