I have been busy trying to figure out why an existing Microsoft SQL server 2008 couldn’t be used by System Center Operations Manager (SCOM 2012). After research it seems that SCOM 2012 not only demands a certain collation of the SQL databases, but also need a certain collation of the server.
The collation for the databases is:
SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
Please note that this is the *only* supported collation by SCOM2012! This collation is not the standard collation of an SQL instance when installed!
The original error was:
The other errors are resolved by:
This post about Secure Keys on my site
This post about the Operational Database not meeting the minimum Cumulative Upgrade Requirement
So if you, like me, plan to upgrade from System Center Operations Manager 2007 (SCOM 2007) to SCOM 2012 you need to check the collation of your Microsoft SQL server on which the OperationsManager and OperationsManagerDW databases will reside.
The solution is simple, but not very.. handy. Microsoft says that if you have a different server collation than SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS for your Microsoft SQL server, you cannot install SCOM 2012 on that server. The option is to reinstall the SQL server. This isn’t an option in many organizations i guess. The other option is a fresh install of SQL. This is what i did. A new server. A new license. A new server to add to the backup plan. And so on. Like said before: Not very handy.
Microsoft states that if another collation besides SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS is specified when installing SQL, Operations Manager will have to be reinstalled as you will get errors after installing the product similar to the following error:
Cannot resolve the collation conflict between “SQL collation “SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS” and “Latin1_General_CI_AS” in the equal to operation.
The workaround provided by Microsoft is, when reinstalling SQL, to select collation SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS.
Microsoft also noticed this “flaw” in their design.
I hope this was informative for you.
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