Today I was working on problem related to VMware Update Manager pointing to wrong database and I managed to find the solution to this problem.

In my case SQL server was running on Windows Server 2008 R2 so I had to check 32 bit DSN located in %SystemRoot%\syswow64\odbcad32.exe

Of course DSN was pointing to correct database on correct DB server but VUM was still not working.  Also it is important to mention that two days before vCenter Server was migrated from one host to another with vCenter Server version upgrade. I knew previous SQL database names so I knew what I was looking for. On new SQL server I created new databases - the one which was VUM referring to.

I didn’t know how to find root cause but colleague of mine suggested that it must be somewhere in VUM configuration file.

I did small Powershell (grep like) query which pointed me to configuration file.

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Get-ChildItem -Filter *.* -Recurse | Select-String DBSTRING

When Powershell query finished I got results where DBSTRING was located. It was vci-integrity.xml file located in VUM installation folder - in my case C:\Program Files (x86)\VMwareInfrastructure\Update Manager.

After changing section in xml and restarting VUM service everthing worked fine.

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<database>
    <dbtype>SQL Server Native Client 10.0</dbtype>
    <dsn>WRONG DSN</dsn>
    <initialConnections<20</initialConnections>
    <maxConnections>40</maxConnections>
    <password>DB PASSWORD</password>
    <username>USER PASSOWRD</username>
  </database>

Sadly after spending some time on this I found VMware KB kb.vmware.com/kb/101522.