We have a vSphere server 5.0 server where the database is loaded with a light version of SQL 2005 (I believe it was installed as part of the vSphere 5 installation). We have recently stood up a larger SQL server and would like to move the SQL server to a 2008 R2 database server. After reviewing the documentation it seemed simple enough, but when I tried to do it, it didn't work out.
I shutdown all of the services and backed up the database. I create the database on the new server and restored from backup. I have a service account I want to use for access, so I associated that with the newly restored database on the new server and made the service account a DBO for that database. I think went to the ODBC entry used by vSphere and changed the database server name and selected the database. The test of the ODBC connection worked fine. I then tried to restart the vSphere services and the main service hung on start up and created a bunch of errors in the logs saying it couldn't contact the database. I tried upgrading the SQL client to the latest version and recreated the ODBC entry, but that didn't help. When I reboot the server the vSphere server service hangs and you can't even get into the server using RDP. If I disable the vSphere service the server comes right up. when I look at the logs for the vSphere service, they say it can't contact the database.
I found an article that says how to modify the registry to to add a user name to the database properties, and it also contained the command line for updating the password, but those to changes together appear to have had no affect. When I pointed the server back to the original database through ODBC and removed the user name and password from the registry, the server operates just fine. I am pretty sure the database is fine, and the ODBC connection is OK, so how do I tell vSphere to use integrated authentication with a domain account? Or am I just missing something more fundamental...
