vRA 7.4 deployment fails on database creation.

Something new popped up during a manual deployment of vRA 7.4. The deployment failed with a time-out during the database creation.

After restarting it a second time, the outcome was the same. I downloaded the scripts to manually create the database and to see where it exactly fails. If you need them, you can download them from https://vra_fqdn:5480/installer. Below you can see where to get them.

I started my testing with preparing an empty database. Here is the official VMware article to do that.
In that article you will see that we need to edit these 2 files :
1. CreateDatabase.sql
2. SetDatabaseSettings.sql

The first script flew by, meaning no issues here. However, it hung on the second script. After executing it line per line (to determine the cause) we saw that our script froze at “ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION ON”.

After talking to an SQL guy, he recommended to update to the latest SQL patch release. This is a known bug in the SQL code and there is a workaround available by Microsoft.

But when you just make sure that the SQL you deploy has the latest patch level, that also fixes your issue. After my SQL was upgraded to the latest patch level, my database creation succeeded without issues. 🙂