Clustering the SCOM 2007 R2 RMS Role on a Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 Cluster (Part 3)

If you have followed Part 1 and Part 2 in this series, you will have your SQL 2008 R2 Cluster built and your Active Directory service accounts and SPN permissions configured correctly.

In this part of the series, we will manually create the two databases that SCOM uses into the SQL 2008 R2 cluster. We need to manually create these databases instead of letting the SCOM installation wizard create them due to the fact that SQL 2008 R2 is only recently supported by Microsoft and the SCOM installation wizard will not recognize the SQL 2008 R2 instances.

To check prerequisites for OperationsManager and Data Warehouse database installation:

1. Log on to Node 1 of the cluster that is to be used for SQL Server 2008 with the Operations Manager Administrator account credentials.

2. In the Failover Cluster Management tool navigation pane, expand the cluster that you are installing the OperationsManager and Data Warehouse databases on.

3. Expand the Services and Applications container and select your SQL Server instance.

4. In the results pane, ensure that all your SQL Server resources are owned by Node 1 and that they are online. The required resources are:

• Server Name and IP Address 
• Disk Drives 
• SQL Server 
• SQL Server Agent 

5. Ensure that the Data Transaction Coordinator is owned by and available on Node 1.

6. Close the Failover Cluster Management Tool.

Creating the SCOM Databases in SQL 2008 R2:

Follow the procedure below to manually create the databases:

How to use the DBCreateWizard tool to install the OperationsManager database:

Note 1 - You must run the DBCreateWizard tool on the server that is running SQL Server 2008 R2.

Note 2 - If User Account Control (UAC) is enabled, this needs to be turned off first, otherwise the DBCreateWizard.exe tool will give an error and not proceed

 Open the <InstallationMedia>\SupportTools\AMD64 folder

(Note <InstallationMedia> represents installation media of System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.) 

• Double-click the DBCreateWizard.exe file to start the Database Configuration Wizard.

(Note You may receive an error message when you start the wizard. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: 938997 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938997)

• On the Welcome page, click Next. 

On the Database Information page, perform the following operations:

• Under Database Type, select Operations Manager Database.

• Under Full Database Instance Name, select the instance of SQL Server where you want the database to be installed. 

(Note An instance of SQL Server has the name of <ServerName>\<InstanceName>. The default instance has the name of <ServerName>. )

• Leave the Create New Database option selected. 

• Leave the SQL Port box blank. 

(Note If you do not provide a port, the Database Configuration Wizard uses the port 1433 to connect to SQL Server. However, if the instance of SQL Server that you specify uses a port other than 1433 for connection, you must specify the port in the SQL Port box. )

• By default, the database name is OperationsManager under Database Name. 

• By default, the database size is 500 megabyte (MB) under Database Size. 

• Click Next. 

On the Management Group page, perform the following operations:

• Under Management Group name, specify a name for the management group. 

• By default, the BUILTIN\Administrators user group is specified under Configuration Administrator. It is recommended that you select your ‘srv_scomadmin_group’ here and ensure you have added the domain administrator account to this group too if you want to be able to open the console using the domain admin account otherwise only Local Administrators specified on this computer will be able to open the console. 

• If you want to specify a different user group, follow these steps: 

       Click Browse.

       In the Select Group dialog box, click Locations.

       In the Locations dialog box, select the domain and then click OK.

       Under Enter the object name to select, type the user group,then click Check Names.

       If the name that you typed becomes underlined, click OK.

       On the Error Reporting page, indicate whether you want to send error reports, click Next

       On the Summary page, review the configuration summary, and then click Finish.

How to use the DBCreateWizard tool to install the OperationsManagerDW database:

Note 1 -You must run the DBCreateWizard tool on the server that is running SQL Server 2008 R2.

Note 2 - I ran into problems when installing the DW database using the DBCreateWizard and specifying a database size larger than around 30GB. The SQL server kept timing out the connection and in the end, I installed the OpsMgr DW DB specifying a 30GB size, then used SQL Management under the DB properties/files section to increase the size of the MDF and LDF files to what I wanted to

To create the OperationsManagerDW database, simply follow the instructions from above on creating the OperationsManager database only this time, you will be specifying the db name of 'OperationsManagerDW' instead.

This concludes part 3 of my 'Clustering the SCOM 2007 R2 RMS Role on a Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 Cluster' series. In Part 4, I will go through the creation of the RMS cluster group and resources.