Several months back, I was installing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 on a Microsoft 2008 Server running IIS7 while attempting to place the database on a Microsoft 2008 Server running SQL Server 2008 Enterprise and was running in to a small problem during setup.
Even though I updated the installer files when starting the CRM 4.0 installation, the installer was not able to understand a connection string that contained a port number. For security reasons, we do not enable the SQL Server Browser service on our database servers and we run all of our instances on custom ports. During the CRM 4.0 installation when for the database\instance field I entered ‘SRVDB1 \CRM,60041’ – the installer did not understand the comma 60041 part.
To resolve this problem (until the installer is fixed), you can make a registry entry to define the port number for the server\instance combination so that you can move past that point of the installation. Once you get past that point of the installation, you can update the database connection string in the registry for CRM 4.0 and then remove the registry entry added in this post.
To associate a custom port number to an instance of SQL Server on a remote machine, make the following addition to the registry: (where SRVDB1 in the remote machine name, CRM is the instance name and 60041 is the custom port number)
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Client\ConnectTo]
“SRVDB1\\CRM”=”DBMSSOCN,SRVDB1\\CRM,60041″
After you make this change, run the installer, enter SRVDB1\CRM (your server name and instance name) for the database\instance, complete the installation, update the connection string in the registry for CRM 4.0 to include the comma and custom port number, and then delete this new registry entry (you may want to fully qualify your server name when you update the connection string in the registry). Leaving the entry does no harm either – unless you forget its there and try to do something else with that server/instance at a later date on the same machine.
Hope this helps! If you need any more help on getting this to work or how to set up your SQL Server to hide instances from detection or setting your custom ports – let me know.
-Eric Niemiec
Notice: I have not retested the installer with the release of Update 2 for CRM 4.0, so the installer may be fixed already.
