This week, we have been talking about running the Microsoft Baseline Configuration Analyzer 2.01 with the SQL Server Best Practice Analyzer for 2008 R2.  Today I want to talk about one of the errors that occurred on one of the new boxes I just stood up in a new cluster.  You may encounter a prerequisite error stating that the user is not a member of the Administrators group on the remote machine or PowerShell remoting is not enabled on the remote server.  This is easily remedied.

1. Add the user as a member of the Administrators group, or
2. Run Enable-PSRemoting in PoweShell with elevated privileges, AND
3. Run winrm set winrm/config/winrs `@`{MaxShellsPerUser=`”10″`} in PowerShell with elevated privileges.

Once I made these changes the analyzer was able to proceed.  The analyzer will give you these directions, but I figured if you are reading this beforehand you can make the changes proactively.  Enjoy!

Yesterday, I showed you how to install the Best Practices Analyzer and use it through the Baseline Configuration Analyzer.  Even after your servers are setup for best practices, it is good to run the BPA from time to time to look for changes, especially if you have more than one DBA working on your servers.  Here is a great example of its use:  we purchased a new piece of software that needed to setup its database during the install.  No problem, we do this quite often.  After the install, two databases were created.  Everything looked fine on the surface.

Not satisfied with everything looking fine, I ran the BPA and got the following results:

That’s right, the vendor tried to sneak in the Auto Shrink option.  Now I can quickly remedy this situation and sleep easy tonight knowing that my SQL Server is yet again unblemished, for the most part.

Enjoy!

Are you trying to conform your systems to Microsoft standard best practices?  Have you used Microsoft’s tools for automating this?

The first item you will need is the Microsoft Baseline Configuration Analyzer 2.0 (download).  It will help you to maintain optimal system configuration by analyzing against the predefined set of best practices which we will download next.  The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Best Practices Analyzer (download) is a component that runs within the MBCA.  In addition, you will need PowerShell v2.0 installed on the server.  This server can run against other SQL Servers so it does not need to be installed on your SQL Server.

Open the Microsoft Baseline Configuration Analyser and select SQL Server 2008 R2 BPA from the drop down as shown here.  However, the first time you run the MBCA, you will have to type in the host and instance information.  As you can see from my screenshot, I have already run this program at least once and now I can simply click once and scan it again.  You can also choose Enter Parameters to view this screen, as shown below.  Here it will let you choose which specific aspects of SQL Server that you would like to compare against the Best Practices for 2008 R2.

From this point you are ready to proceed with the scan and then view the results and recommendations presented after the analyzer compares against your particular SQL Server instance.  Enjoy!