Moving the WSUS database

We use WSUS 3.0 on our corporate network in order to maintain Microsoft patches for the 5,000+ computers.  For the last seven or eight months, everything had been running smoothly.  I received a call from the network engineer in charge of that server this past Tuesday.  He said that he couldn’t connect to the admin interface and he had a lot of SQL errors in the event log.

When I looked at the logs, I saw that the errors were for licensing.  A default installation of WSUS will install Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Embeded Edition. This version of SQL Server is limited version of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition that only allows connections from a short list of Microsoft products (i.e. WSUS, Sharepoint, etc.).  SQL Server Express Edition has a file size limit of 4 GB (database files, not logs) and the WSUS database had grown over that limit.

I told the engineer that we should move the database to my SQL Server 2005 Enterprise cluster.  Not only would that allow us to have a larger database, it would be much faster than the embedded SQL Server he was running on the WSUS server.  I found the instructions for performing the move on the Microsoft Technet Windows Server Update Services site.  The article is called Migrating from Windows Internal Database to SQL Server 2005.

There were two things I had to do in order to make the WSUS server work with my SQL Server cluster. Under Migrating the WSUS database from a Windows Internal Database instance to a SQL Server 2005 instance on a remote server:

Our WSUS server is running much better now. The engineer told me that the reports he pulls from the WSUS admin interface run a lot quicker thanks to the better SQL Server. Adding the WSUS database to the SQL Server caused a very small resource hit, even while running large reports that perform multiple queries. I was glad that something went right this week. :)

A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. – Herm Albright

21.Sep.08 Microsoft SQL, Networking, Software, Technology

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6 Responses to “Moving the WSUS database”

  1. Seb | November 11th, 2008 at 7:27 am

    Hi
    Thank you for your advices.
    I’m getting into trouble with this process : still getting connection error after applying your further steps, and the swl server application log reports
    Login failed for user DOMAIN\SERVEROBJECT$’. [CLIENT: 192.168.XXX.XX]

    Perhaps could you help me to find it out ?
    Thank you

  2. wyckedone | November 12th, 2008 at 3:50 pm

    Add a new user to your SQL Server logins for the machine running WSUS. The username will be in the form of DomainName\ServerName$ (note the dollar sign at the end). So, if your domain name is Home and your server name is WSUS, the new user will be Home\WSUS$. Assign the WSUS database as that user’s (Home\WSUS$) default database as well as mapping the user to the WSUS database and assigning rights (usually DBO).

    Hope that helps.

  3. Bob | January 8th, 2009 at 7:44 am

    I’m trying to find information. Is 64bit SQL 2005 supported on the Backend???

    I’ve tried setting up WSUS is such a environment with no luck at all. The installation will go fine, but starting the MMC will fail.

  4. wyckedone | January 8th, 2009 at 7:33 pm

    I don’t know about SQL 2005 64-bit. I would assume it would work the same since what I did was basic SQL Server settings. What error(s) do you get when starting the MMC?

  5. Stefan | January 16th, 2009 at 10:16 am

    Yes no problem with 64Bit. We are running a WSUS 32bit Frontend with a 64Bit SQL Server backend without any problems

  6. Tim | March 6th, 2009 at 9:16 am

    We tried all of the things listed above with no luck, we think because we cannot add a computer account to the SQL 2005 Logins – SQL simply will not allow “DomainName\ServerName$” to be added as a login

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