Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

It’s well documented that if you want to install vCenter on an x64 Windows 2008 OS you need to create a 32-bit DSN rather than he normal x64 DSN, Jason has a post on this over at his site.

However – on a clean install of Windows 2008 R2 x64 you don’t get the drivers for the SQL Native Client out of the box so whatever you do, you can’t create a compatible DSN

If you have a separate VC server from the SQL server you need to install the SQL native client on your VC server otherwise it won’t work.

You can download it from this page as part of the SQL 2008 Feature pack; the direct download links are below

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Native Client

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Native Client (SQL Native Client) is a single dynamic-link library (DLL) containing both the SQL OLE DB provider and SQL ODBC driver. It contains run-time support for applications using native-code APIs (ODBC, OLE DB and ADO) to connect to Microsoft SQL Server 2000, 2005, or 2008. SQL Native Client should be used to create new applications or enhance existing applications that need to take advantage of new SQL Server 2008 features. This redistributable installer for SQL Native Client installs the client components needed during run time to take advantage of new SQL Server 2008 features, and optionally installs the header files needed to develop an application that uses the SQL Native Client API.
Audience(s): Customer, Partner, Developer
X86 Package (sqlncli.msi) – 4549 KB
X64 Package (sqlncli.msi) – 7963 KB
IA64 Package (sqlncli.msi) – 11112 KB

You can then install this package on your vCenter server

You can then follow the steps in Jason’s post to run odbcad32.exe and configure a 32-bit DSN

Scroll to the end and select SQL Native Client (not “SQL Server”) and configure the client as required (remember to change the default database setting to the vCenter DB you created (see install guide)

Then restart the vCenter installation process and you will be able to select the DSN you created