Windows Vista client connecting to SQL 2005 Cluster on Windows 2008

dbaduck — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:58:00 GMT

There have been a couple of issues that keep pestering the SQL Server community for those that use Vista as their client.

Example: SQL Protocols Blog entry

Now Microsoft has created a KB on it: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936302,

I have tried and tested a solution that fixes this, and it is related to the KB, that was not available for some reason when I originally had the problem. So the steps that I took to solve it are as follows:

Open Windows Firewall in Control Panel
Go to the Exceptions Tab
Click on Add Program
Find SQL Server Management Studio and click OK
Test the connection

I did this several times with enabling and disabling the firewall and having consistent results that I could now connect to the Windows 2008 Cluster that had SQL 2005 Failover Instances on it. I then went to a colleagues workstation and it fixed it as well.

Ben Miller : SQL Connectivity

Windows Vista client connecting to SQL 2005 Cluster on Windows 2008