Installing VMware Site Recovery Manager : Please wait while setup is initializing…

Does this screen look familiar?  Double clicking the SRM installation executable and you will be presented with this familiar initialization bar.  The issue is that it will NEVER complete if you are running on Windows 2008 R2.  After a bit of playing around, right clicking and launching ‘As Administrator"’ allowed the installation to continue.

As a test, I then tried to uninstall the application from the Windows 2008 R2 Control panel and the same issue presented itself.  Not sure how to ‘Launch as Administrator’ from the Control Panel but if you launch the original setup executable again, you will have the option to uninstall.

How about if you need to add parameters to the setup (as is the case for many to one installations), just make sure you launch from a ADMINISTRATOR:CMD window.  From there you can launch with <SRM Installer.exe> /V"CUSTOM_SETUP=1" for instance.