Recently, one of our prod servers was identified to have been missing the security patches for quite some time. I noticed that the SCCM client needed to be remediated, and the client was pushed accordingly, but the client remediation attempt failed multiple times.

LocationServices.log indicated, “MSXML 6.0 not available, failing over to lower version.”, and the same error was encountered in CCMEval.log.

According to Microsoft, SCCM 2012 client has some potential external dependencies, depending on the operating system and the installed software on the computer. If any of the dependencies are required to complete the installation of the SCCM, they are automatically downloaded and installed along with the client installation. Here’s the link to the TechNet article outlining the SCCM 2012 Client prerequisites in detail.

Since our server in question ran on Windows Server 2003, it needed the dependency of “Microsoft Core XML Services (MSXML) version 6.20.5002 or later” which couldn’t be downloaded during the SCCM Client Installation, causing the issue.

Solution: Manually downloaded the Msxml6_x64.msi from Microsoft (Link), and manually installed to fix the issue.