Thursday 22 September 2011

Troubleshooting DB Connections in VMware Appliances

There's a new batch of virtual appliances from VMware and increasingly they need some kind of DB backend to function. This usually means cranking up the web-front end of the appliance, and in the configuration page typing in the name of the SQL server, username, password and name of database.

It can take sometime for these configuration pages to do there thang. And sometimes they come back with horribly cryptic error messages that aren't particularly illuminating. So here's a tip for me. Find a Windows machine that has the SQL Native Driver installed, and try configuring a standard system DSN to the same DB, using the same credentials. The ODBC does a relatively good job send back the reason why you can't connect - once you can connecting using the ODBC administrator, then there should be no reason why the same method shouldn't work on the appliance...

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