Resolving “The Microsoft Identity Manager server database could not be successfully populated” installation error

Here is yet another of those Microsoft Identity Manager installation errors that doesn’t give you much information and when looking for a resolution you can’t find an exact match through Dr Google.

Nearing the end of the Microsoft Identity Manager Service and Portal installation you receive the “The Microsoft Identity Manager server database could not be successfully populated” error.

Looking into the installation log (which I’m in the good practice of always initiating when doing an installation of the MIM Service/Portal these days eg. msiexec /i “e:\Service and Portal\Service and Portal.msi” /l*v c:\temp\install.log )  didn’t give up much information at all. Fatal Error. Dialog created.

Looking at the server that the installation was being done on I could see that it was being spanked. This server is for a customers development environment, hosted in Azure but also done rather frugally (my Virtual Machine was running, SQL, MIM Sync, all the dependencies for the MIM Portal and then the MIM Service/Portal itself). FWIW the initially provisioned VM was an Azure DS1v2 server. Seems a character may have got lost in the VM request where an Azure DS11v2 server would have been more appropriate.

I re-sized the Azure VM and actually chose to go with an Azure DS3v2 VM size. I kicked off the Microsoft Identity Manager Service & Portal installation again and ….

….. SUCCESS.

Hope this helps someone else who may find themselves in a similar position.

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