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In an installation of VMware Horizon View one requirement is the VMware Composer database to keep track of the various pools with linked clones. But this is the only mandatory DB (if you have linked clones), because for the various View Connection Servers there isn’t any strictly database strictly requirement, since they exchange and share data via a specific data structure based on Active Directory Lightweight Mode (actually an LDAP tree replicated between each replication server).

But in real scenario, it becomes useful, from the management point of view, set up a shared database for the View Events. There are a lot of resources that help in this database setup and configuration (for example, Microsoft SQL Server, there’s this post), but the procedure is not particularly complicated (you need just some attentions on the ports, on the firewall rules and on the authentication type). DBMSs supported are SQL Server (SQL Express can also work) or Oracle.

The possible problem in using SQL Express for the View Event is related to the database file size limit, considering that there isn’t a simple way to handle the data retention.

View-EventSettingsThe only available options are for define which events must be report and which must be archived, and how classify the events. But a real retention policy is missing and old data cannot be purged (like happen in the vCenter Server database) and you will notice a continuous grow of the database files.

There is a thread on the VMware community with some possible script in order to clean and purge old data from a SQL Server based database.

But you may  have limited time to reclaim the space and in this case a dirty solution is simple drop the tables in the DB and re-set again the EventDB (just confirm the existing connection data and the tables are rebuild).

Another option, for the future, is just don’t use a database and move to the syslog server option introduced in the recent versions of VMware Horizon View:

View-Syslog

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Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.