Blog Marcina Bojko

So, the question is – how to deploy and maintain farm of Microsoft SQL Servers? With different domains, install sources, roles, features. Should we create unattended installers for every single instance?

No, we shouldn’t.

We should use Powershell DSC – https://github.com/PowerShell/xSQLServer
With Foreman/Puppet and win_manage, we have something like:

The simplest way:

instance1:
  dsc_instancename: MSSQLSERVER
  dsc_sourcepath: "\\our.server.com\ourshare"
  dsc_sourcecredential:
    user: anonymous
    password: anonymous
  dsc_setupcredential:
    user: DOMAIN\someuser
    password: somepassword

Or, more sophisticated:

instance1:
  dsc_instancename: MSSQLSERVER
  dsc_sourcepath: "\\our.server.com\ourshare"
  dsc_sourcecredential:
    user: anonymous
    password: anonymous
  dsc_setupcredential:
    user: DOMAIN\someuser
    password: somepassword
  dsc_features: SQLENGINE
  dsc_forcereboot: true
  dsc_agtsvcaccount:
    user: DOMAIN\scvaccount
    password: somepassword
  dsc_sqlsvcaccount:
    user: DOMAIN\sqlaccount
    password: somepassword
  dsc_sqlcollation: SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
  dsc_sqlsysadminaccounts:
    - DOMAIN\someadmin
    - DOMAIN\someotheradmin
  dsc_securitymode: SQL
  dsc_sapwd:
  user: sa
  password: paaaswordisverysecure
  dsc_sqluserdbdir: D:\MSSQL\Data
  dsc_sqluserdblogdir: E:\MSSQL\Data
  dsc_browsersvcstartuptype: Disabled

Whole install from local source takes aprox. 400 seconds (with other OS related settings) to finish.