Studying for SharePoint 2013 exam, I’ve decided to install it in my lab and as usual I had some issues. I was thinking to use SQL server on premises used for SCCM 2012 R2 test lab, but it is 32-bit, therefore, unusable. Due to the limited resources (You know, RAM goes first) I ended installing 64-bit SQL Server 2012 SP1 on the same server (standard 2012 R2) side-by-side with 32-bit SQL. It’s not the best practice, but it is OK for a constantly changing test lab. Installation was pretty straight forward, all prerequisites were already installed and in minutes 64-bit SQL server was in place. I have two pre-created domain accounts sqladmin and spsservice used for the installation, names speaks for themselves. As an instance and in order to recognize it easily I’ve named it MSSQLSERVERx64 (not very creative, but understandable) and selected mixed authentication. SharePoint binaries were installed on another virtual machine, installation is covered by many folks, so I wouldn’t describe it here, one thing worth mentioning though, to prepare SharePoint installation I’ve used this PowerShell scripts, thank you Craig Lussier. Do yourself a favor and read the description! And yes, to the end!
In order to make side-by-side sql servers work one of them must use non-default (1433) port. In fact if you check SQL Server Browser state in SQL server configuration manager, most likely it will be stopped. I’ve choose to move the port for 64-bit server, to do it open SQL Server Configuration Manager and follow this Technet how-to, I selected port 50000, any unused port above 1024 will do it and Don’t forget to enable them like I did 🙂, then restart SQL instance (in my case MSSQLSERERx64) and start SQL browser if it is stopped. Check is the server listening on the selected port with netstat -an in cmd. With that done move back to SharePoint box and start SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard, next on the first screen, new farm in my case on the second and we reach all important Database Settings part of the wizard. For a database server use sqlservername\sqlinstance,non-default port (example in my case servername\MSSQLSERERx64,50000) selected earlier, otherwise the installation fails with a “…loopback” error. If IP address of the server is used it fails as well.
Cool way to test the connection in advance is to create a text file on the sharepoint vm and rename it from .txt to .udl!
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