SQL credentials

Proper rights must be assigned to the account that is entered when the Application Manager prompts for credentials. If these credentials are not properly assigned, you will be prompted to enter alternate credentials before protection can be enabled

For SQL, you should first configure all permissions as described in Application Manager Credentials. In addition, the user must have SQL Server System Administrator permission.

In order to operate the Application Manager for setup and to manage failover and failback for SQL, the following permissions are required:

The user must be assigned the System Administrator role on the SQL server in order to query and Administer SQL.

If the SQL Server service is not using the same domain user account on the source and target servers, the SQL Service Principal Names (SPNs) of the source and target servers must be modified.

Note:

The Application Manager will fix this during validation, granting permission to the local system account on the target. For more information, see Manually set SPN permissions.
The source and target SQL accounts should use the same domain account so that SQL SPNs do not need to be updated on failover.
When using a domain service account for SQL server 2005 that is not in the domain admins or local admins group, the replicated databases will not mount on the target. This is due to security restrictions at the file system level. The workaround is to place the SQL 2005 service account in the local admins group of the target.
On SQL 2008, local group permissions are not copied to the target during failover. You will either need to use a domain admin as the SQL service user, or manually copy the group permissions to the target.

Assigning SQL Server System Administrators permission