Using a Remote Empty Database for VMM Installation

Hello my name is Kerim Hanif, I am a Program Manager in Virtual Machine Manager product responsible from Setup feature.

As you may already know during VMM installation you can use an existing database or specify a remote database.

Remote empty database scenario is very important for many of our customers who have all SQL servers in their environment managed by database admins (DBA) and all database creation requests go through and performed by DBAs.

As you may imagine in these environments permissions that DBAs give to these databases needs to be as limited as possible.

Our documentation has the information about configuring a remote instance of SQL server for VMM http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc764295.aspx but I thought it would be helpful if we can provide step by step instructions on how to perform this operation (thanks to our tester Deepa F Thomas for providing these steps)

These steps apply to SQL Server 2005 and will walk you through a specific example. It includes the whole process from the empty database creation in SQL server to VMM setup so that you can see the entire picture and granular permissions that are required.

Note: Before you ask, yes we officially support this installation J

1. Connect to the remote SQL server instance with SQL server admin credentials (e.g. contoso\dbadmin) using SQL Management Studio.

2. In SQL Management Studio, right click on databases and select “New database”

3. Enter the name of the database, (e.g. VMMDB).

a) If it is a case sensitive SQL server instance then select “Options” on the left pane, in the “Collation text box”, select “SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS”, this will create the database as case insensitive, select OK.

4. Under “Security”, right click on “Logins”, select “New Login”, enter login name (e.g. contoso\VMMadmin), select OK.

5. Right click on the login that we just created and select “Properties”.

a) Select “Server Roles” in the left pane and check the roles “dbcreator”, “process admin” and “securityadmin”.

b) Select “User Mapping” on the left pane and check “VMMDB” and check “db_owner” database role membership.

6. Login to the VMM Server machine with  VMM admin’s credentials (contoso\VMMadmin) start VMM server setup (or you can even login as contoso\OtherVMMadmin and give contoso\VMMadmin credential on SQL Settings page.