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Microsoft Azure – Azure Storage Emulator: Unable to Start Development Storage Error – Fix

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Introduction

In this article we are going to see a real time error fix on initializing Azure Storage Emulator: Unable to Start Development Storage Error.

Overview

This error is specific to starting Azure Storage Emulator on packaging the Azure application to deploy it to the cloud. Today when i opened my new environment (Windows Server 2008 R2) and started my first application in that environment it stopped me while building with an error as “Azure Storage Emulator: Unable to Start Development Storage“

After checking some resources then finally got a solution on how to fix this issue. Let us see the step by step process on how to produce this issue and fix the same in Windows Server 2008 R2 Environment(though the fix is same across the environments as well)

Steps

Open Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and Navigate to File –> New Project we can see the new template window as shown in the screen below. Select the Cloud tab (left side menu) and click on Azure Project (If by any chance if you see Enable Azure then you need to download the Azure SDK and install the same) and give a project name as shown in the screen below

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Clicking on the OK button will populate a window to select the role as shown in the screen below

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In our sample we will select the normal web role(ASP.Net Web Role) and click on OK button as shown in the screen below

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Now a new application will be opened and do some changes as per our requirement as shown in the screen below.

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Once we made the changes hit F5 to build and execute our application to see the end result locally before deploying to the cloud. We can see an error now as “Windows Azure Storage Emulator: Unable to Start Development Storage” as shown in the screen below

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As the error itself mentioned to use the DsInit utility from the Azure SDK, navigate to the path as shown in the screen below and we can see the Utility as highlighted in the screen below.

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Just double click on the utility will open a wizard to prepare for the solution, but we can see an error in that process itself indicating that the database will not be created since Server was not found as shown in the screen below

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The idea behind this error is, the DsInit utility needs some input parameters to process the request. So to check the possible input parameters navigate to the path in Command Prompt and give DsInit / . “/” will provides the list of parameters required and it acts like a help form for the utility as shown in the screen below.

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As we can clearly see from the help option, the utility requires a parameter of the local instance (SQL Server instance) as shown in the screen above. So now navigate to the path and give the utility with the parameter as shown below

DSInit /sqlinstance:.

Since here i am going to point to the local server i have mentioned as . for remote servers we need to give the fully qualified name of the server instance.

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Once we give the correct server name and click on enter will again open the Utility wizard, but this time it will process the utility perfectly since the required paramters are given as shown in the screen below and we can see the result as Installation Successful. The Storage emulator is now ready for use.

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Now close all the windows(Wizard, Folders) and go back to the Visual Studio 2010 IDE and try to build and execute the application by hitting F5 and we can see the build successful as shown in the screen below.

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Now we can see the Storage Emulator has been succesfully started and seen in running condition as highlighted in the screen below.

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Finally we can see the desired output as shown in the screen below.

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Conclusion

So in this article we have seen the option to fix the Windows Azure Storage Emulator development start error