Notes from the Field: Installing SCOM 2007 R2 Databases into SQL 2008 R2 Part 1

This is a blog post that I’ve been meaning to put up for nearly a year but kept forgetting to document the process during SCOM installs – until now!

There are a couple of issues when you are installing SCOM 2007 R2 into an SQL 2008 R2 environment that can be quite annoying and the fix isn’t that obvious at first glance for them. The issues occur when the DBCreateWizard.exe hangs or crashes and the SCOM Reporting installation hangs half way through too.

When you try to install the SCOM databases into an SQL 2008 R2 environment using the standard SCOM installation process, you will soon see that it fails on the pre-requisite check for SQL server and will report back that you don’t have SQL Server installed as the image below shows!

Because the SCOM 2007 R2 media is not SQL 2008 R2 aware, you need to manually create the SCOM ‘Operations Manager’ and ‘OperationsManagerDW’ databases using the ‘DBCreateWizard.exe’ utility.

Before creating the SCOM databases, it’s always a good idea to know what size you will want your databases to grow to, I always use the OpsMgr Sizing Tool v1.3 as a guideline to sizing and you can download it from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=23016

To manually create the SCOM databases in your SQL 2008 R2 environment you first need to copy the SCOM media (or at least the ‘Support Tools’ folder from the media) to your SQL 2008 R2 server.

Note: Make sure that you have already created a new SQL instance for the SCOM databases with an SQL Collation setting of :

‘SQL_LATIN1_GENERAL_CP_CI_AS’ ( no other SQL collation will do for your SCOM install!)

Now open a command prompt with administrator privileges, browse to the SCOM media location and open up the \SupportTools\AMD64 folder

 Now run the 'DBCreateWizard.exe' utility

 Once the Database Configuration Wizard opens, click on 'Next' to continue 

From the next screen, choose which database you will be installing, select your SQL instance, specify the size of the database and ensure you have your database and log file locations correct, then click ‘Next’ to continue

Next up, choose a name for your SCOM Management Group and specify what administrative groups have access to the SCOM console

Choose whether or not you want to send your Error reports to Microsoft and then click ‘Next’ again

 Confirm all is good in the final screen, then click ‘Finish’ to build the first ‘OperationsManager’ database

All going well and you should see the screen below confirming that the Database installation was successful

So, what was the problem with that you might ask? So far, nothing! All goes well with this first ‘OperationsManager’ Database installation but you will start to run into problems when installing the ‘OperationsManagerDW’ database component on an SQL 2008 R2 server.

To begin installing the ‘OperationsManagerDW’ database, you will follow nearly identical steps to the ones above for the ‘OperationsManager’ database.

To kick it off, again run the ‘DBCreateWizard.exe’ utility from an administrative command line

Once the Database Configuration Wizard window opens, click 'Next' to continue

From the next screen, choose the ‘Operations Manager Data Warehouse Database’ option from the drop down menu, select your SQL instance, specify the size of the database and ensure you have your database and log file locations correct, then click ‘Next’ to continue

Confirm all of your settings are correct and then click ‘Finish’ to install the Data Warehouse DB

Now, after a short while, if you’ve selected to install a database that is any size larger than around 40GB (in my example above, I’ve chosen to create a 100GB one), you will get a timeout error back from your SQL server stating:

‘Database creation failed. The database might have been incompletely created or modified.’

The trick here is to create the database using the DBCreateWizard utility but don’t specify a size greater than 40960MB (40GB). Once this 40GB Data Warehouse completes successfully, then we have to go into the SQL Server Management Studio and increase the size of the databases from there. We will also need to increase the size of the log files for each database at this point too.

In Part 2 of this short 'Notes from the Field' series, I'll continue on with manually expanding the SCOM databases using the SQL Server Management Studio and will also walk through the SCOM Reporting installation and the issues that can arise when installing it into an SQL 2008 R2 SSRS environment.