Find vCenter/View Databases

This is a quick resource on how to quickly find some databases that common VMware components are using. There are multiple ways you could find each of these; these are just the ways that I use. Something important that is taken into consideration here is that I usually do not have credentials to authenticate to the MSSQL server when I’m looking for this information. So just editing the DSN through the regular ODBC GUI isn’t an option.

vCenter, Update Manager, View Composer

1. Open regedit and browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREODBCODBC.INI
2. Select the key that reflects the database you’re looking for. You will find a string called “Server” defining the server name and “Database” defining the database name.

View Events

1. Log in to View Administrator and navigate to View Configuration > Event Configuration
2. Details are listed under the “Events Database” section

Alternatives

vCenter:

1. On the vCenter server, browse to C:ProgramDataVMwareVMware VirtualCenter
2. Open the file vcdb.properties in notepad
3. The line “url=” contains information on connecting to the database
   1. In my case, “sqlserver://<server name>;databaseName=<database name>“

Do you know of other ways to find these databases or others? Let me know in the comments.