Today while working in my lab I was facing one issue when I was trying to install vCenter Server on top of Server 2012. I was experimenting to deploy vCenter Server with external SQL 2014 database. This was my first experience with working on external database for vCenter Server and I knew I am gonna face some issues.

I created vCenter Server database on my SQL Server and tested connection from vCenter Server to database (ping, telnet etc) and all went fine. I setup 64 bit DSN on my vCenter Server to connect to the SQL Server and that too went fine and I was very relaxed that most difficult part is already over.

This is when my happiness was blown away by error as described below.

On database settings page when I choose next I was getting error “The user associated with the DSN has insufficient privileges“. This is shown below:

I was not aware of this issue so I started googling and immediately found the solution.

To resolve the above issues we need to follow below steps:

1: Uninstall Microsoft ODBC Driver 11 for SQL Server (if installed any)

In my case I had that installed in my system and I removed it for good measures:

The only requirement for vCenter Server to connect to external SQL Server database is presence of SQL Server Native Client. The latest version  of native client can be downloaded from here

2: Assign VIEW ANY DEFINITION and VIEW SERVER STATE permission to the vCenter server user.

To do so connect to your SQL Server database and navigate to properties.

Go to Permissions and select the vcenter server user (alexsvcvcenter in my case), Under permissions drag the sidebar to the bottom most part and checkmark the view any definition and view server state checkboxes. Hit OK to save.

And that’s it. You will be able to navigate to next page of installation without any issues.

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