How to find/view vCenter database

Today when I was working with one of my friend to setup VMware SRM in his test environment, I found myself in a situation where I wanted to view the vCenter database but he was not sure about database server. It took me some time to figure it out so thought of writing a post for future reference.

These are the ways to find vC database:

1. On vCenter server browse to C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\cfg\vmware-vpx this path is for vCenter server 6 , for vCenter 5.x browse to C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\cfg\vmware-vpx and find the file vcdb.properties

Open the file vcdb.properties in notepad and here you will find what you were looking for,

The line after “url=” contains information on connecting to the database (With vCenter Server 6 the embedded database is changes from SQL Express to a vPostgress database.).  

2.   From ODBC connections,

Start > Settings > Control Panel > ODBC Connections > System DSN

or if you don't have credentials to authenticate to the MSSQL server,

Open regedit and browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ODBC\ODBC.INI 

Select the key that reflects the database you’re looking for. You will find a string called “Server” defining the server name and “Database” defining the database name.

By using DSN method you can also find other product's databases detail.

If there are other ways to find out these dbs please let me know, anyways thanks to James for related blog post.

Thant's it... :)