>>Hi, I'm Michael Otey,
a SolarWinds contributor and president of TECA Inc.
Today we're gonna look at creating a SQL Server
unattended installation using a configuration file.
In this presentation, some of the things
we're gonna cover we're gonna look at the steps to create
an unattended installation and how you actually create
that configuration file.
Then we'll step through using the SQL Server
Configuration Wizard, and then finally you'll see a demo
of actually using that configuration file to perform
an unattended setup.
So what are the steps we need to perform?
Well basically, first you run the SQL Server
Installation Center just like you would if you were
performing a manual setup.
You go through the setup wizard screens,
you select all the desired options that you want,
and then when you get to the end of the setup screen
on the Ready to Install screen, you'll notice there's
a configuration file setting at the bottom.
That will tell you where your ConfigurationFile.ini
is located, that which recorded all your
configuration settings.
Cancel at that point.
Then you can edit your ConfigurationFile.ini,
setting in whatever desired options you have to make it run.
There's a couple things you need to do to make it run
unattended and I'll show you that in a demo in a second.
Then finally, you run the setup.exe program and
supply that configuration file as a parameter.
When you run the setup wizard, here are some of
the important issues that you need to look for.
First, you can go ahead and launch the "SQL Server
standalone installation or add new features
to an existing installation option" like you see here.
But you can also perform the "SQL Server failover
cluster installation" if you want, or the "Add node
to a SQL Server failover cluster."
All of these have the ability to create
a configuration file.
As you step through the wizard and you select the different
options that you want, you'll see here on the right side
of the screen, you'll get to a
Ready to Install SQL Server dialog.
And then at the bottom of that dialog,
if you hadn't noticed this before,
there's a configuration file path
and all of your setup configuration settings will be
recorded into that ConfigurationFile.ini
and you can then feed that file to the setup.exe program
to perform an unattended installation.
Alright, let's see this in action.
Now, let's create a configuration file that we can use
to perform an unattended SQL Server configuration.
First, let's open up SQL Server Installation Center
and on the Installation tab we're going to
select "New SQL Server standalone installation
or add features to an existing installation."
Remember, as we create this configuration file,
this is exactly like walking through a normal
manual configuration.
The only difference is, and you'll see this at the end,
is that we don't complete it; we cancel the installation
before we get to the end.
So let's start our SQL Server configuration.
It takes it just a second here to come up with the first
screen of the installation wizard.
And here it comes.
So first it's asking for a product key.
We'll select the default.
Then we'll have to accept the licensing terms.
Even though we do this, we are going to have to modify
the configuration file.
And you'll see how we do that when we get to that point.
It's gonna ask us to check for updates.
In this case, we're gonna go ahead and skip that
'cause we're just going through the process to
create the config file, not actually performing an update
for SQL Server right now.
So it'll take it a second as it installs
the configuration files and then goes through a rules check.
Next it asks us for the features that we want to install,
so we'll make this a relatively simple
SQL Server installation.
We'll put in Database Services,
we'll put in Reporting Services,
and we'll add the Management Tools.
And I think that will probably be it.
Now let's go ahead and click Next.
At this point, SQL Server will go through a few checks.
Remember, we have to have the prerequisites on
to get the installation to work and in this case
that meant the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 needed to be in place.
Now it's performing those checks and you can see it
pass the rules.
Now it's asking us for the default instance name.
We'll keep the default of MSSQLSERVER.
Then when we get to our Server Configuration screen,
for ease of setting this up we'll just keep
the default account names that the services will run under.
We'll keep Windows authentication mode and add
our current user.
You'll see this is something we're gonna have to
change though, later, in the configuration file
because we'll want this to be a little bit more generic.
Once we set that up, we'll configure and install
Reporting Services.
And at this point, it's gonna do a final check for
the feature rules, and here's the dialog we need
to pay attention to 'cause check out the Ready to Install
feature and at the bottom of the screen, down here,
you can see the configuration path.
This is where all of our settings that we created
when we went through the install have been stored.
We're gonna use this configuration file, then,
to perform an unattended install of SQL Server.
And we'll step through that next.
Note the location of the configuration file in
"Program Files\SQL Server\120\Setup Bootstrap"
and we'll cancel this and then we'll open an instance
of Explorer and find that file.
So we're headed over to Program Files
and we'll go to SQL Server, 120, Setup Bootstrap,
and here is the configuration file that we just created.
We're going to edit this file next and we'll open up
Notepad to do that.
Next, we're gonna make a couple of changes here.
We are going to make this an unattended install
so we are going to comment out the UIMODE setting.
We're going to turn QUIET on to True,
then to make this a little more generic
we're going to scroll down and look for our sysadmin setting
because before we added sysadmin and it was
specific to this system.
But we don't want it to be specific to this system,
instead we want this to take on the built-in administrator
of whatever system we are going to run it on
which doesn't tie us to this system.
So let's paste that in.
And then we are going to add the license agreement portion.
Even though we specified it in the interactive part,
for some reason it doesn't record it here,
so we need to add it manually.
So we'll paste that in.
Then we'll save this configuration file.
Next, we're gonna use it as part of the setup process.
Now, let's exit out of the Installation Center.
Then we'll open up a Command Prompt
to where our configuration file is located at,
and it was right here.
So we'll open a Command Prompt here.
Open Command Window.
There we have it.
And now, we're going to run the setup program
and pass in the configuration file parameter
along with the path to our configuration file.
And now, at this point this will go ahead,
running setup.exe in a command kind of mode
using the settings in our configuration file
which are unattended, and it's gonna perform a setup
for SQL Server.
This takes it a little while because it's performing
all of the different SQL Server setup tasks.
At this point, it's completed and you can see our SQL Server
installation was completely unattended and now SQL Server
is installed on this system.
If we go over to the Start Menu and we open it up,
we should find an option to run
SQL Server Management Studio.
And here's our new apps, and here we have SQL Server 2014,
and down here if we scroll down,
here's SQL Server Management Studio.
It takes it just a second to load up the user settings
for the first time.
Then when it fires up, we can connect into it.
And here you can see our new instance of SQL Server
so our unattended installation was completely successful.
And that's the end of this presentation
showing how you can perform an unattended SQL Server
installation using configuration files.
Thank you for watching!