I had installed FIM 2010 using an SQL Server alias, which worked fine – I use the same process when installing SharePoint and it has helped before, so I thought “why not with FIM?”. Famous last words.
I tried to deploy FIM 2010 Cumulate Update 1 and it failed, citing “Cannot connect to SQL Server”. I had the nasty suspicion that while FIM 2010 seemed to support SQL Server aliases, the Cumulate Update process did not.
FIM 2010 maintains information on SQL Server connections in the Registry under the hives:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\FIMService
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\FIMSynchronizationService\Parameters
The FIM services use these keys to establish database connections. Likewise, the Cumulative Update process accesses these locations to perform database updates.
A final note – after changing to a SQL Server instance instead of an alias, I got some errors when trying to upgrade the database via the Cumulative Update 1:
25070 Invalid class string
Installing the latest SQL Server Native Client from the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 Feature Pack fixed these errors.
Tags: FIM2010; SQL
