vagrant-mssql-express

A Windows 2012 Server with SQL Server Express 2012 powered by Vagrant.

This repo was forked from here. It was updated to support Sql Server Express 2012 on Windows Server 2012

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/mince27/vagrant-mssql-express
cd vagrant-mssql-express
vagrant up

Get a coffee as it will take a while for it to finish provisioning. The first time it has to download the vagrant box and sql server express.

Connecting to the SQL Server instance that runs inside the VM

• IP / Host: 192.168.50.4
• The ip will be the private_network value defined in Vagrantfile
• Username: sa
• Password: password1
• To change this modify the value in install-sql-server.cmd

If you are using Rails you will need the following gems

gem 'tiny_tds'
gem 'activerecord-sqlserver-adapter', '~> 4.2.0'

This is what you'll have in your database.yml:

development:
  adapter: sqlserver
  database: <YOUR DB>
  host: 192.168.50.4 # Should match the private_network in Vagrantfile
  username: sa
  password: 'password1'

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.

• Username: vagrant
• Password: vagrant

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