Pruning vCenter 4.1 Database Using SQL Express

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My home lab vCenter is a self contained Windows 2008 R2 VM, running vCenter 4.1 on SQL Express. Last night, I ran into an issue where the vCenter service would not start, in fact, it was quite angry. Why? Well it seems after 14(ish) days I had hit the 4GB database limit. Here’s the process I followed to clean this up:

  1. Install SQL Management Studio for SQL Express from here.
  2. Download the VMware Database Pruning scripts from here.
  3. Open the scripts from #2 in the tool from #1
  4. Change the default value from 180 days down to 2.
  5. Change the delete value from 0 to 1.
  6. It’ll look like this:
    image
  7. Hit Execute, that’ll look like this:image
  8. You’ll then want to right click the database and shrink it:
    image
  9. With that you should be finished.

VMware has a video describing the process:

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