Software:  VMware vSpehre 5.1 / SQL 2008 R2

After migrating the vCenter database from local SQL 2005 to dedicated 2008 I looked through all the vCenter logs:

This appeared in the sms.log

[2015-02-20 16:22:29,239 Thread-22  ERROR com.vmware.vim.common.lifecycle.InitializerExecutor] Initialization error; attempt 1202 will begin in 60 seconds…

java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException: java.lang.IllegalStateException: org.apache.commons.dbcp.SQLNestedException: Cannot create PoolableConnectionFactory (The connection to the host dbhost.jordansphere.co.uk, named instance  has failed. Error: "java.net.SocketTimeoutException: Receive timed out". Verify the server and instance names, check that no firewall is blocking UDP traffic to port 1434, and for SQL Server 2005 or later verify that the SQL Server Browser Service is running on the host.)

 

I also notcied this error when clicking on storage views:

I opened up port 1434 (UDP) on the destiantion server and the SQLBrowser service was already started.

Next I looked at that vcdb.properties file  located in C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\ . I had removed the named instance when migrating the DB but the documentation suggested that wasn't required when using a remote SQL server. I did notice a couple of extra slashes in there:

url=jdbc:sqlserver://dbhost.jordansphere.co.uk:1433\\;databaseName\=VIM_VCDB;integratedSecurity\=false

 

I removed these and it started working:

url=jdbc:sqlserver://dbhost.jordansphere.co.uk:1433;databaseName\=VIM_VCDB;integratedSecurity\=false