Today I installed Service Bus Server Beta release and the overall install experience was fairly smooth until I reached the New-SBFarm step of the ‘Getting started’ tutorial. The cmdlet just seems to hang for few minutes and failed ultimately – I tried on another machine & got same results. After lot of head–scratching I narrowed down the issue to SQL connectivity. Turns out New-SBFarm create 3 different databases, Farm management DB, Gateway DB & the message container database. The first two DBs are created by the cmdlet itself & it uses the Connection String passed into the cmdlet and just replaces the DB name. The message container DB creation is handled by another cmdlet ‘New-SBMessageContainer’ which uses the FQDN of the database server.

When server is identified using FQDN, SQL client code treats the connection as ‘Remote’ and because I was using a named instance – it tries to resolve the name using SQL Browser service which was by default disabled :(

Hence the cmdlet hanged until connection request timeout – Enabling remote connections on Sql express & starting the SQL Browser service has fixed the issue.