I encountered a little issue when restarting my Windows 2003 server hosting both VirtualCenter and the internal SQL 2005 Express database. SQL wasn’t fully started before VirtualCenter tried to logon and generated the following failure.
SQL Server is not ready to accept new client connections. Wait a few minutes before trying again. If you have access to the error log, look for the informational message that indicates that SQL Server is ready before trying to connect again.
Just e few events further Virtual Center was shutting down on me.
Forcing shutdown of VMware VirtualCenter now.
I know you can set a dependency on the VirtualCenter service so it would wait until SQL was fully running and till my great surprise, my old friend Andrew Kutz already has written an article about it.
You just need to add a value to the following registry key.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\vpxd and edit the DependsOnService property (REG_SZ_MULTI) and add the MSSQL$SQLEXP_VIM value.
