Many years ago, Microsoft introduced Best
Practices Analyzer (BPA) tools for server products such as SQL Server
and Exchange. The tools enabled IT professionals to conduct a scan
against a product to ensure it was configured based on industry best
practices. For many years, IT professionals wanted a similar tool to
scan their Windows infrastructure; however, one did not exist. Windows
Server 2008 R2 introduced a BPA tool, which is included with all
editions of Windows Server 2012 except for Server Core. When scanning
server roles to find best-practice violations, the BPA tool measures a
server role’s compliance based on eight different rule categories. The
rule categories are Security, Performance, Configuration, Policy,
Operation, Predeployment, Postdeployment, and BPA Prerequisites.
Compliance is measured based on three severity levels: Error, Warning,
and Information. It is worth noting that only a select few server roles
are supported with BPA.
Note
The Windows BPA tool should be run on a
regular basis to alleviate incorrect configurations, poor performance,
poor reliability, and security violations.
Follow these steps to launch the Best Practice Analyzer tool:
1. Open Server Manager from the taskbar.
2. From the left pane, select a server role view.
3. Scroll down to the Best Practice Analyzer section, and from the Tasks menu select Start BPA Scan.
4. From the Select Servers dialog, select the servers that should scanner for best practice configuration for the selected role.
5. When the scan is complete, review the results in the same Best Practices Analyzer section, as displayed in Figure 1. Each result is categorized as Information, Warning, or Error.
Figure 1. The Best Practices Analyzer Results screen.
When using the GUI to run a BPA scan, it is
possible to filter the scan results using a variety of criteria. The
common filter tools of Server Manager are available for the BPA GUI and
can be used to include or exclude specific categories and severities
among other fields.
