Cannot install cDAQ drivers on Windows 2008 R2 virtual machine

[nmuleski]

I'm having lots of issues trying to install the drivers for our NI cDAQ 9178 device onto a Windows Server 2008 R2 64bit virtual machine.  We are running a vmWare ESX enviornment.  The cDAQ device is connected via a Digi USB Anywhere device.  That part of it seems to work fine.  The O/S sees the device as a cDAQ 9178, but with no drivers (obviously).  

When I try to install the drivers (I've tried using both the DVD provided and the new drivers downloaded from ni.com) I get a bunch of error messages about portions of the installation failing.   It's always error 1722 and it always says a certain component has failed to installed because of a problem with the Windows installer package.  I've attached an example.  I get maybe 10-15 of those when installing the drivers, always for a different component of the driver.

I've followed the advice of both of these KB articles to no avail:

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/websearch/334E91287EDEA75286256D9B003A947A?OpenDocument

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/34ABE6F20DD4981D86256E8600752DFE

We also ran into the same kind of issue when installing LabView on the VM, but it still seems to work fine.

Anybody have any ideas? 

[Eric-M]

Hey nmuleski,

Virtual Machines can be really finicky.  They are not officially supported, but they generally tend to work.  One thing you can try is downloading the DAQmx driver from the device driver cd and see if that works for you.  There is also the downloadable online version here.  You may have luck with this since you were able to install LabVIEW on your VM.

[nmuleski]

We spun up some new, fresh 2k8 R2 servers and lo and behold the drivers installed without an error. 

I'm guessing the error had something to do with all the other programs we have on that server.  Guess we'll just dedicate a VM for Labview... ahhh I love virtualization