vagrant-mssql-express

A Windows Server 2008 R2 VM with SQL Server Express 2008 R2 SP2 powered by Vagrant.

⚠️ Heads up! ⚠️

This was just an experiment on how to set things up for a project I worked on the past, I'm not planning to keep this project up to date with latest Vagrant / SQL Server updates or making additional improvements to it.

Requirements

• Vagrant 1.6+ (tested on 1.6.3)
• VirtualBox 4.3+ (tested on 4.3.16 on an Ubuntu host)
• Around 12GB of disk space (3GB for base box + ~9GB for the VM)

Base box information

• Configured with 2 CPU and 2 GB memory by default.
• No updates or services packs applied
• The box is not activated. It has been created for testing and evaluation purposes only. Use of this machine for greater than 30 days will require a full license either via MSDN or your local Microsoft Reseller.
• The box has been created with packer.io using the templates made available here.

More information can be found on the box page at Vagrant Cloud.

Usage

git clone https://github.com/fgrehm/vagrant-mssql-express.git
cd vagrant-mssql-express
# Download SQL Server with Tools installer
wget http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/4/B/04BE03CD-EAF3-4797-9D8D-2E08E316C998/SQLEXPRWT_x64_ENU.exe
vagrant up
# Get a coffee as it will take a while for it to finish provisioning

Then test the connection with the SQL Server using telnet 192.168.50.4 1433

Connecting to the SQL Server instance that runs inside the VM

• IP / Host: 192.168.50.4
• Username: sa
• Password: #SAPassword!

If you are using Rails, apart from installing tiny_tds dependencies with brew install freetds / apt-get install freetds-* and the activerecord-sqlserver-adapter gem, this is what you'll have on your database.yml:

development:
  adapter: sqlserver
  database: <YOUR DB>
  host: 192.168.50.4
  username: sa
  password: '#SAPassword!'

More information on https://github.com/rails-sqlserver/activerecord-sqlserver-adapter/wiki/Using-TinyTDS

An example Sinatra app can be found on sinatra-app.

Connecting to the VM using Remote Desktop connections

If you need to perform administrative tasks like importing a DB dump or creating new databases, you can use the vagrant rdp command and log in with the vagrant user and password.

For the vagrant rdp command to work on Ubuntu, you'll need to apt-get install rdesktop first. On Macs, you will need Microsoft Remote Desktop from the Mac App Store.

More information

If you want to know more about how the provisioning process work, check out this blog post

Sponsor

This project was made possible thanks to HE:labs

Resources

Here's some links I collected along the way while building this:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms144259%28v=SQL.100%29.aspx
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee176858.aspx
• http://iqbalnaved.wordpress.com/2013/09/28/configuration-for-connecting-to-mssql-server-2008-on-virtualbox-guestos-from-ubuntu-12-04-hostos-using-pyodbc-3-0-8/
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd206997(v=sql.105).aspx
• http://sirsql.net/blog/2011/6/21/set-the-sql-tcpip-port-with-powershell.html