How to Extract MP resources from an MPB (Cloud Services MP Example)

This seems to come up quite often and my usual explanation doesn't seem to be sufficient for everybody so I’ll explain in detail here what the process is for getting MP resources from an MPB.

First of all it is important to know that an MPB is just an .MSI file with a different file extension.  You can read more about MPBs here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2009/09/04/introducing-management-pack-bundles.aspx

For this blog post I’ll use the Cloud Service MP as the example.  You can download it from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=28726

Note: It is the file called System_Center_Cloud_Services_Process_Pack.zip.

Since this is downloaded as a .zip we first need to just extract all the files from the .zip and we end up with this:

Normally, if you were just going to install the CSPP you would just click on Setup and go through the simple wizard.  In this case though we want to run the System Center Cloud Services Process Pack.exe self-extracting executable.  It will prompt us for a location to self-extract the files to.  After that we end up with these files:

Now, I just happen to know that the MPB files are located in the IaaSRequestMPB files because well… MPB is in the file name!

So – if you just run the MSI file it will do nothing.  So you have to use the /a prompt in MSIExec to get the files out of it.  Like this:

msiexec.exe /a IaaSRequestMPB.msi /qb TARGETDIR=<somewhere to extract to>

Note: the command above assumes that you are in the same directory as the IaaSRequestMPB.msi file.

Here’s the command that I used as an example:

That creates this new folder called Extract in the same location as the IaaSRequestMPB.msi file.  If you look in that new folder you will see these files:

Drill into the PFiles folder and you will see:

Drill into the Cloud services process pack and you will see:

The .MPB files! We found them!!

Now to extract the resources out of them.

Just follow these instructions:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff978847.aspx

Note: you cannot extract .mp files from .mpb files this way.  For some reason even sealed MPs are stored as .xml files in the .mpb.