Notes from the Field: Installing SCOM 2007 R2 Databases into SQL 2008 R2 Part 2

In Part 1 of this short series, I walked through the manual installation of the SCOM databases using the DBCreateWizard.exe utility and also highlighted some of the issues that you will encounter when creating large SCOM databases manually with SQL 2008 R2.

In this post I will walk through the process of increasing the SCOM database and log files manually using SQL Server Management Studio and will also go through the pitfalls encountered when installing SCOM Reporting into and SQL 2008 R2 SSRS instance.

First up, we need to now increase the database and log sizes of the SCOM OperationsManager and OperationsMangerDW databases that we created earlier.

To do this open up your SQL Server Management Studio and right mouse click on the OperationsManagerDW database and then click ‘Properties’ from the drop down menu

No go to the ‘Files’ menu from the left hand side of the screen and you should see the MOM_DATA and MOM_LOG values for the database. The MOM_DATA value is the size of the database and the MOM_LOG value is the size of the log for that database. Firstly change the MOM_DATA value to the size that you want your OperationsManagerDW database to be in Megabytes – I’ve chosen 102400 for a 100GB data warehouse

Once the database sizing is complete, go back into the data warehouse properties and modify the MOM_LOG value to reflect your new log size

Repeat this process with your ‘OperationsManager’ database and modify the size of the DB and Log files to the required amounts.

Once you have your SCOM databases the correct size you can then go ahead and begin installing the SCOM RMS role (this is automatically assigned to the first server you build in a SCOM Management Group).

When you run the installer from the SCOM media on your SCOM RMS, you will need to be careful about what components you choose to install. You will need to ensure that you are not installing the ‘Database’ role as this has already been created using the ‘DBCreateWizard’ utility.

You need to de-select this role like the screen below

Carry on through the rest of the SCOM installation as normal and once it finishes, you should have your first SCOM server installed and connected to your SQL 2008 R2 ‘OperationsManager’ database.

The final hurdle that you will meet when installing SCOM onto an SQL 2008 R2 instance is when you go about installing the SCOM Reporting component. The reporting module uses the ‘OperationsManagerDW’ data warehouse database and has dependencies on SQL 2008 R2 Reporting Services.

On the SQL 2008 R2 server with the Reporting Services instance installed, run the SCOM installation media and select the ‘Install Operations Manager 2007 R2 Reporting’ option

Work through the wizard and again de-select the database option – in this case the ‘Data Warehouse

When you have inputted in your Root Management Server name and specified the SQL server and instance that the Data Warehouse database is located, you will be presented with the ‘SQL Server Reporting Services Instance’ window from which you need to select your SSRS instance and click ‘Next’………

It’s at this point however that your SCOM Reporting installation will hang and look like it has become unresponsive. I have seen this screen hang like this for sometimes 30 minutes without doing anything!! Very frustrating!

The fix is quite simple though and it’s related to a local user group that gets created on the SQL server when the SQL 2008 R2 Reporting Services (SSRS) role is installed.

To resolve the problem, on the SQL 2008 R2 SSRS server, click ‘Start’, then ‘Run’ on your server and then type ‘lusrmgr.msc’ and click ‘OK’ to open the ‘Local Users and Groups’ snapin

Once this opens, click on the ‘Groups’ folder and expand the ‘Name’ column out so you can see the full name of each group as below

You will notice that one of the groups is titled

‘SQLServerReportServerUser$SQLSERVERNAME$MSRS10_50.SSRSINSTANCENAME’

If you right click on this group and remove the _50 characters from the name so it instead shows

‘SQLServerReportServerUser$SQLSERVERNAME$MSRS10.SSRSINSTANCENAME’

You should then see a window opening up immediately from your hung SCOM Reporting install that looks something like this

If you see the window above, then all that’s left to do is to fill in the fields requested and work through the wizard and that will be your SCOM Reporting configured successfully!

If the above window doesn’t open for you and instead you see the window below immediately after renaming the SQL Local Group, then you need to carry out some more simple tasks before you're done.

When you see the Window above with an error message of:

'SQL Reporting Services Validation Error'

'Setup has encountered an error while installing Reporting'

then click the ‘Back’ button to go back one screen

Now open up the SQL ‘Reporting Services Configuration Manager’ from your start menu and ensure that you have a database specified. If this is the first time you’ve seen this configuration window, then you just need to run through each of the options on the left hand side and select default settings for each menu to complete the configuration (these options will be overwritten by the SCOM Reporting Installer). The main reason you get the error message from the SCOM Reporting installation above is because your SSRS instance hasn't been fully configured and most likely there is no reporting database or website specified.

Once you have configured your reporting services with default settings, exit the configuration wizard and then go back to your SCOM Reporting installation and click ‘Next’ again (or if you've closed out of it, just re-run the SCOM Reporting installation again). This time you should see the screen below allowing you to continue.

Once you see this screen, then you’re only a few clicks away from successfully completing your SCOM Reporting Services installation with SQL 2008 R2!!