Maintenance Tab
The Maintenance tab (see Figure 5) has four more features for you to enjoy.
Figure 5. Maintenance tab in the SQL Server Installation Center
The Edition Upgrade Wizard allows you to upgrade
an installation from a lower edition to a higher one. If you don’t know
what is meant by “lower edition,” just think of how much each edition
costs. For example, you can upgrade from Standard to Enterprise, but you
cannot upgrade from Enterprise to Standard edition. This feature isn’t
here just to up-sell you on the bigger and faster vehicle; it does have
some use in the upgrade scenario. Although it is possible to upgrade
directly from SQL Server 2005 Standard to SQL Server 2012 Enterprise,
the best practice would be to upgrade to SQL Server 2012 Standard first
and then perform this edition upgrade once your existing applications
are verified.
The Repair Wizard is the second of the three
wizards available on the Maintenance tab. It runs through and checks the
integrity of the installation, making any necessary changes to get you
back to the original installation. Use this wizard if you had a
previously failed installation of SQL Server.
The “Remove node from a SQL Server failover
cluster” wizard guides you in removing a node from a SQL Server cluster.
This task was once a pain to perform, but this wizard makes node
removal much easier in SQL Server 2012.
Searching for product updates within setup makes
it easy to install the latest bits the first time. Although this check
is performed when you install an instance of SQL, you can check for
updates whenever you want using the, “Launch Windows Update to search
for product updates” link.
Tools Tab
The Tools tab (see Figure 6) contains four tools that will help users in their installations of SQL Server.
Figure 6. Tools tab in SQL Server Installation Center
The System Configuration Checker tool is the
same one as was described on the Planning tab. The link to the tool is
included on this tab also, just for convenience’s sake.
On some occasions, you may be installing SQL
Server 20012 on a server that may already have components of SQL Server
or other instances of SQL Server installed. The “Installed SQL Server
features discovery report” option does a quick inventory of the SQL
Server instances and components that are installed on the local server.
The tool presents these findings in an HTML document format for easy
reading.
The discovery report obtains this information
only for the local server. However, it is possible to run a different
utility—the MAP toolkit—to obtain this kind of inventory information
across your enterprise.
Finally, the PowerPivot Configuration Tool
allows you to deploy PowerPivot into an existing SharePoint 2010 farm.
PowerPivot for SharePoint enables the sharing of PowerPivot workbooks
(created in Excel) via the SharePoint platform.
Resources Tab
The Resources tab (see Figure 7) contains a plethora of links to online resources related to SQL Server 2008.
Figure 7. Resources tab in SQL Server Installation Center
Advanced Tab
The Advanced tab (see Figure 8) contains links to wizards that will assist the user in special-case installations.
Figure 8. Advanced tab in SQL Server Installation Center
One of the more common techniques for installing
SQL Server is to do it without a user interface (UI). This technique is
called a scripted install and is very useful when you have to
install multiple SQL Server instances. Imagine trying to run through the
setup wizard on each one of your 20 SQL Server instances. Not only
would that process take a long time but you would be spending a lot of
time sitting at the server waiting for the installation to finish.
Scripted installs leverage a configuration file that specifies all the
properties you would have set while walking through the wizard. The end
result is you don’t have to sit there and wait to click the Next button.
The most
important one is that you don’t have to sit and launch Notepad and write
one of these configuration files from scratch. You can simply run
through the setup wizard once and, instead of proceeding past the Ready
to Install page, just copy the file path provided on this page and click
Cancel. The file path is the location of a configuration file based on
the options you selected in the wizard.
The “Image preparation of a stand-alone instance
of SQL Server” option invokes a wizard that helps you create a Sysprep
image of SQL Server. Sysprep is a tool that is used to help deploy
images of system across multiple servers. Imagine if you had 30 brand
new servers and you wanted to install Windows Server and SQL Server on
all of them. This would take a lot of time. However, if we install one
and then use Sysprep on that server, we could take that the resulting
image and deploy it across the 29 other servers. The “Image completion
of a prepared stand-alone instance of SQL Server” option invokes the
wizard you run to finalize this Sysprep image. By “finalize,” we mean
setting the specific computer name for that server and other instance
specific information.
Once you have a configuration file, you can simply pass this file to Setup on the command line (setup.exe/ConfigurationFile=myCustomSQLInstall.ini) and come back when it’s finished.
