How to find a list of local MS SQL Servers? I looked at How can I determine installed SQL Server instances and their versions? already but CMD returns nothing:

C:\Windows\system32&gt;sqlcmd -L

C:\Windows\system32&gt;


But when using Visual Studio (v2019), I go to View > SQL Server Object Explorer, I see two SQL Server instances with system databases inside. One is called (LocalDB)\MSSQLLocalDB and the other (LocalDB)\ProjectsV13.

Both are using SQL Server 2016 (v13.0.4001). Using that I was able to connect through SSMS 2018 as well.

My question is: why aren't these instances showing up in the command line? And can I delete one of the server instance? Why are there two?

I have tried:


I checked my services and I there is only SQL Server VSS write. everything else is irrelevant to SQL. I looked up in SQL Server configuration manager but SQL Server services is empty there as well. I checked in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Shared and sqlbrowser.exe was not there also.
I just tried setting up inbound and outbound rules on TCP 1433 and UDP 1434 to allow connections. Failed again with nothing returned from cmd.
I turned on firewall logs and checked the logs after running the command a few times but nothing is being recorded (success or failure). I opened powershell and did test-netconnection to my ip and port 1433 and 1434 but the ping failed. Still nothing written to the firewall log files.
-- Powershell

Import-Module sqlserver 
'computername'| Foreach-Object {Get-ChildItem -Path "SQLSERVER:\SQL\$_"}

Make sure you don't have linked server (LocalDB)\ProjectsV13 pointing to itself (LocalDB)\MSSQLLocalDB

Check any alias defined