Before I begin writing about this problem, understand that this problem can be caused by many reasons and the reason written in this post is only one of them.
Problem
You’ve completed going through the new topology wizard in Topology Builder and proceed to publish the topology but get the following error:
Step: Creating Central Management Store
Status: Failure
Clicking on the View Logs button shows the following content in the log file:
Error: Error connecting to “lyncstd.domain.comrtc” while installing “CentralMgmtStore”. Verify that the SQL instance is running, connections are not being blocked by a firewall, and that you have SQL administrator permissions. For details, see the following log file: “C:UserstlukAppDataLocalTemp2Create-CentralMgmtStore-lyncstd.domain.com_rtc-[2011_05_17][15_38_22].log” 5/17/2011 3:39:23 PM Error
Error: An error occurred: “Microsoft.Rtc.Common.Data.SqlConnectionException” “A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 – Error Locating Server/Instance Specified)” 5/17/2011 3:39:39 PM Error
Solution
As I mentioned earlier, this can be caused by many issues but most of the time it’s because the topology publisher cannot contact the backend SQL server. When I was called about this problem, the first question I asked was whether SQL was installed yet and as it turns out, the Prepare first Standard Edition Server step wasn’t ran yet and this step is where the installer creates the local SQL instance for a Lync Server 2010 Standard Edition server.
Once I got the administrator to run this step, the topology published without any issues.
