I often find myself having to reinstall software.  I liked the way I installed it last time, but over time something occurred that required a reinstallation.  I don’t have instant recall on a lot of things… thus like much of my blog, I generate articles which assist me in the future.   This article relates to the installation of Microsoft SQL Server 2008r2. 

This outlines how I install this application within my personal test environment.  If you have alternative ways I would love to hear about them in the comments section of this post. 

Not all screen shots have comments, but a few do that require additional explanations.

I try to leave the firewalls on within my environment in order to promote good security practices.  MS SQL warns me whenever the firewall is on and directs me to a website with details on SQL’s firewall requirements when accessing the server from other systems.  (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=94001)

When I visit the link, I find I will need to configure the windows firewall to poke a hole for SQL.  Read my SQL Firewall article for details on doing this.

 

All of my special services are configured with extremely limited domain accounts.  Thus I needed to specify which account the SQL instances will run as.  They are specified here.

 

I wanted to allow both Domain and Local logins for my SQL server.  Thus I set it up with Mixed mode, configured an “SA” account password and added my domain account to the list of administrators of the DB server.

 

In the future I want to create a virtual SQL cluster.  In order to pre-plan for that I needed to put the database onto a separate vhd drive.  Thus I setup a separate vhd, mounted it via vSCSI and mounted it as the E:\ Drive.  Now This step shows pointing the database’s “data” drive at this new E:\ drive location.

 

 

Now that the base installation is complete, I need to patch-the-hell out of it.  A quick browse of Google and I find that SQL 2008r2 has a published Service Pack.  I wrote a step-by-step guide for installing SP1 here…

Leave your comments or suggestions below!