Sunday, August 19, 2012

SQL Server Unattended installations


I was aware of the configuration.ini file that gets created during the normal GUI installation of SQL Server. This configuration file can be changed and reused to perform command line/remote installations. But in order to generate that initial file, you have to go through the GUI steps initially. Thats what I used to think. I have been reading SQL Server Bible by Paul Nielsen (Its a great book, btw. I wish I read it a couple of years ago) and I came across an interesting piece of info about unattended installations - Microsoft ships a template.ini file that you can use to kick off remote installations in the installation dvd. 

There is a long (very long!) article on BOL about command line and unattended installs:

There are two ways to go about it

You run the setup.exe file from command prompt specifying the components, passwords you want to install, passwords etc:


Start /wait <CD or DVD Drive>\servers\setup.exe /qb INSTANCENAME=<InstanceName> ADDLOCAL=All PIDKEY=<pidkey value with no "-"> SAPWD=<StrongPassword> SQLACCOUNT=<domain\user> SQLPASSWORD=<DomainUserPassword> AGTACCOUNT=<domain\user> AGTPASSWORD=<DomainUserPassword> SQLBROWSERACCOUNT=<domain\user> SQLBROWSERPASSWORD=<DomainUserPassword>

Use the template.ini file to create a configuration.ini file and kick off the install

setup.exe /settings <full path to your .ini file>

Example:

setup.exe /settings C:\binyoga\sqlinstall.ini

You may use \qn switch for a silent installation with no dialogs and \qb switch if you can live with progress dialogs.

Click here for a sample template.ini file


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