Changing the name of the SQL Server that CRM uses

When spinning up bundled images on Amazon’s EC2 service, you have the option to maintaining the base image’s name or letting the config service update it for you. We chose to update it, and of course, the CRM Asynchronous Service would fail to start. Fortunately, it’s not too difficult to make the necessary changes to get it up and running again. (In our case, CRM and SQL were on the same server)

The following keys in the registry need to be updated in the MSCRM folder:

configdb

database

metabase

serverurl

The following tables in the ConfigDB need to be updated with the new Server name:

Organization

Deployment

After that the service should start up without any problems. In a bundled environment where you will be changing the server name often and you have one server for CRM and SQL, you can simply update your base image so that all connection strings in the registry and database have ‘localhost’ as the datasource instead of the servername. However, the Name column in the Deployment table will need to be updated with the new name of the Server.

Disk2Vhd

This is a really neat tool. Use it to take a VHD snapshot of a physical drive and then use it with Virtual PC or Hyper-V. Very handy when you need to set up a quick development/test/training (etc) environment.

Disk2Vhd