I hate installing things through a GUI–I’ve talked about this before at PASS Summit, and when I worked at big cable, we build a private cloud and fully automated the SQL Server installation process. When SQL Server 2014 launched, my process had virtually no changes, however a number of things broke it in SQL Server 2016 (mostly for the better)
- TempDB installs with the right number of files–they are still too small though
- The behavior of trace flags 1117 and 1118 are built in to TempDB so you don’t need to turn them on
- SSMS is a now a separate installation and download
- I used batch and I wanted to rewrite into PowerShell
So since this is 2016, I decided to share it on Github. You can find it here: https://github.com/DC-AC/SQL2016_Scripted_Install. Feel free to fork and make edits in the code, or tell me how crappy my PowerShell logic is. Read the readme–there’s a few assumptions about your configuration. I’d like to parameterize those over time.
One other thing I wanted to mention is that Denny Cherry and I are doing a webinar this Friday July 29th at 11 PDT/2 EDT talking about managing SQL Server 2016 in production. We’ve have a customer live for a year now, and will share what we’ve learned and answer your questions. You can sign up here.