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My Updated SQL Server 2005 Install Checklist

If you’ve been following me lately (either my blog or Twitter), you know that I’m in the process of building up some new servers on a new SAN for a big database consolidation.

After the first server, I had a pretty good checklist. Brent Ozar has a pretty fantastic checklist that I stole a few items from.  This is my attempt at a more refined checklist. (of my own, not Brent’s)

In my new environment, each server is a VM. The physical box has 16 GB of RAM and the VM will get 8 GB. I have drives for the OS, SQL logs, SQL data, TempDB, and backups.

Here is my order of things:

• Install Windows 2003 (64 bit)
• Install Windows 2003 SP2
• Install our antivirus software
• Install SQL 2005
• Install SQL 2005 SP3
• Set permissions to permit Instant File Intialization
• Set permissions to permit locking pages in memory
• Install System Center Operations Manager  Agent
• Install Quest LiteSpeed
• Attach to SAN/Add VMWare virtual disks
• Create Directory Structure
  • SQL Logs
    • User
    • System
    • Error
  • SQL Data
    • User
    • System
• Move Master DB
• Move TempDB
• Move Model DB
• Move MSDB DB
• Resize TempDB (32 GB data, 16 GB logs), disable autogrowth
• Set default file locations
• Set CPU to boost SQL priority
• Set minimum memory to 6GB
• Set maximum memory to 7GB.
• Configure Database Mail

Disabling autogrowth on TempDB may be a little controversial. I’m okay with that. If TempDB is growing that much on our servers, which aren’t that big, I want to know what the heck is going on.

Okay, fellow DBAs, what did I forget, and what did I do wrong here? I think I did some good stuff here, but I doubt it’s perfect.

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Comments

Did you set the correct disk offset when partitioning your disks? e.g. diskpart.exe => align = 1024?

Comment by Merrill Aldrich on January 25, 2010 @ 3:47 pm

Do I still want to do this when my disk is a virtual disk?

Comment by Mike Hillwig on January 25, 2010 @ 3:56 pm

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jorge Segarra, Mike Hillwig. Mike Hillwig said: The Cranky DBA: My Updated SQL Server 2005 Install Checklist http://bit.ly/8diYSZ [...]

Pingback by Tweets that mention My Updated SQL Server 2005 Install Checklist -- Topsy.com on January 26, 2010 @ 3:28 am

Yes, you still want to do that when you’re using virtualization, believe it or not. Vizioncore even has a dedicated product just to go out, find virtual machines that aren’t partition-aligned, and fix them.

Comment by Brent Ozar on January 26, 2010 @ 12:19 pm

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