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thoen
Contributor
Contributor

Problems connecting to MS SQL Server running on Windows 7 VMWARE Fusion guest

I am running VRWare Fusion with a Windows 7 guest on a MacBook Pro. So far, I have found the installation, configuration, and operation of Fusion on the Mac exceptional. In most cases, the windows applications I run (Outlook, Word, Powerpoint) act like Mac native apps.

The one issue I am facing is connecting from the Mac to SQL Server running in the guest. I can access SQL Server without issue from the SQL Server Management Studio running on the guest. But when I try to connect to the SQL Server instance from a Mac client (Razor SQL, isql/freetds) I cannot complete the connection successfully. I have not figured out a way to detect whether it fails at VMWare or SQL Server.

I have verified that SQL Server is setup to allow remote connections, and is using TCP/IP for communication.

I have tried using both NAT and Bridged networking modes.

I am using SQL Server authentication and have verified that I can connect to the SQL Server databases using a SQL Server username and password when using a client on the guest. The SQL Server was installed as a named instance.

If anyone has experience in remotely connecting to a VMWARE guest instance of SQL Server, I would greatly appreciate your advice.

Best,

Tom

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6 Replies
admin
Immortal
Immortal

Check if you have a firewall in the guest. You could also try packet traces and pings to see if the host can talk to the guest in general.

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thoen
Contributor
Contributor

etung - Thank for your response.

I turned off the firewall on the guest.

I am able to ping the guest's IP from the host.

Unfortunately, I am still not able to connect to the database.

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WoodyZ
Immortal
Immortal

Based on what you've said so far I really do not see this as a Fusion issues per se and more so a configuration issue in that you do not have something other then Fusion itself properly configured.

I'd start simple and with all firewalls temporary turned off share a temporary test folder on the Guest and see if you can access it from both the Host and another physical system on the same subnet the Host is on. If you can then connect to the standard default Windows shared folder from the Host and another physical system on the same subnet the Host is on then it would come down to how you have MS SQL configured and this would not be a Fusion issue

thoen
Contributor
Contributor

The issue turned out to be two-fold. First the SQLBrowser service was disabled, so I had to change the service setting to Automatic, then start the service.

Second, it appears that RazorSQL and FreeTDS cannot find the server using its name, you have to use the ip address. I was, however, able to connect to the database using its server name and instance name from another windows machine on the same network.

So as WoodyZ so deftly pointed out, it was not an issue at all with VMWare Fusion. His suggestion prompted me to dig deeper into the SQL configuration and what services need to be running to connect to the server.

Thank you all for your help.

Tom

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CodeMonkee
Contributor
Contributor

I've had similar problems the last few days, and if you google around you will see others have had it too - between any VMWare VM (not just Fusion) and SQLServer.

Naturally you have to check the 'Surface'/network/remote connection configuration setup on SQL Server before doing anything concerning remote connections. I do that when I first setup SQLServer on a dev machine, but this time around I wasted a lot of time in there when it was really a matter of firewalls blocking the connection and me not realizing I had other issues. I had also tried to set a route in the guest back to the host and that didn't work because of the firewall - naturally.

What my problems came down to was making sure that not only could the host see the guest IP and ports (once I turned off the firewall in the guest I could see it with a ping), but also that the guest could see the host - turning off the firewall in OSX allowed the guest to see the host with a ping. I still had problems with connections via Tomcat via Java, but I downloaded a Java client (RazorSQL) onto OSX and verified that it could see SQLServer in the guest VM. This told me that my problem is a configuration problem somewhere in Tomcat and/or my servlet config, not with Fusion/VMWare.

Just sharing some of what I went through so that others who may come to this thread will see some of this info and have some info to work with.

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thoen
Contributor
Contributor

Another issue I have encountered is how to configure VMWare if the host is not on a network. For example, I was traveling over the last week, and did not have internet access. Because VMWare Networking was configure as Bridge, no IP address was being assigned to the guest, so I could not access SQL Server from the host. I could access SQL Server from the Guest.

I tried changing VMWare networking to NAT. Though the guest now had an IP address, I could not reach the SQL Server from the host. I could not ping the guest (at least, I could not ping the IP address that was listed when running ipconfig on the guest). I have been doing some reading on NAT, but it is not clear to me what the host can access.

It appears that I will need to set up port forwarding on the NAT configuration, but don't want to do that until I am sure that it would resolve the issue.

As anyone encountered this issue, being able to access SQL Server running on a guest OS through VMWare when the host is not connected to a network?

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