Installing SQL Server 2008
© Copyright Decipher Information Systems, 2008. All rights reserved.
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http://decipherinfosys.wordpress.com
Last revised: Jan. 2008
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ 3
Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 4
Installation of SQL Server 2008 ................................................................................................. 4
System Configuration Check .................................................................................................. 9
Feature Selection ................................................................................................................... 10
Instance Configuration .......................................................................................................... 11
Server Configuration ............................................................................................................. 12
Database Engine Configuration ............................................................................................ 13
Analysis Services Configuration........................................................................................... 16
Reporting Services Configuration......................................................................................... 18
Error and Usage Reporting ................................................................................................... 19
Ready to Install ..................................................................................................................... 20
Summary ................................................................................................................................... 24
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Introduction
We have been covering a lot of the SQL Server 2008 features in our blog posts and also released a
whitepaper that had a combination of 20+ blog posts from us on the different new features and
enhancements of SQL Server 2008. You can access that whitepaper in our whitepapers section here:
http://decipherinfosys.wordpress.com/whitepapers/
In this whitepaper, we will cover how you can go about installing SQL Server 2008. We waited on
putting this together since over the CTPs, information changes a lot. The instructions in this document
are based on CTP6 of SQL Server 2008 which is very recent so the chances of these steps changing is less
and we will update this whitepaper if they do change.
Installation of SQL Server 2008
After you have downloaded and extracted the files to a folder, you can double click on the setup.exe
executable which is under the …\Servers\ folder.
At first, you might see the Microsoft .Net Framework version 3.5 Setup Installation if you do not already
have it on the machine on which you are installing SQL Server 2008. The screenshot will look like the
one shown below in Figure 1. You need to be connected to the net in order for the download to happen
or you should have the media with you in order to install the 3.5 .Net Framework.
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Figure 1: Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5 Setup – Download and Installation.
Once the .Net Framework 3.5 has been installed, next you will get the License terms and Installation pre-
requisites screen as shown in Figure 2 below. Check the accept check box and Next to proceed.
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Figure 2: License Terms acceptance Screen
The installation will then proceed with the prerequisites support files installation.
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Figure 3: Completing the Installation Prerequisites
Once the prerequisites have been installed, you will now be presented with the SQL Server Installation
Center as shown below in Figure 4. As you can see, you have the option of doing a new installation or
upgrading from a previous installation of SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005. We will cover the
upgrades in a future whitepaper. In this one we will do a brand new install. The other options that you
get from the installation center are the hardware and software requirements for the install of SQL
Server 2008 – this you should read in case you are in doubt and have not already made sure that you
have the necessary hardware and software present to do the installation. You can take a look at the
Security documentation and the Readme files or if you already have an existing prior installation of SQL
Server 2008 and this is just a new CTP that you have downloaded, you have the option to add the new
features of the CTP to that existing installation – the only caveat is that it needs to be done via the
command line but there are very explicit instructions under the “How to add features” option which will
allow you to do that.
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Figure 4: The SQL Server Installation Center
Other options that you can avail of are to look at the different SQL Server samples as well as to set up
SQL Server Clustering – you can create a brand new failover cluster or you can add/remove a node from
an existing cluster if you need to.
Let’s go ahead and choose to do a new installation. Once you click on that, you will be presented with a
screen that looks like the one in Figure 5.
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Figure 5: First Step in the install: System Configuration Check
System Configuration Check
This step simply verifies a couple of things prior to launching the install. The checks that it does are:
a) OS version check: It needs to make sure that the install is going to be done on the right OS for a
given edition of SQL Server. Essentially, the rules match with the hardware and software
requirements for the install that you can also see here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143506(SQL.100).aspx
b) Checks to see whether any prior SQL Server 2008 installs are present.
c) Whether a default instance is already present.
d) WMI Check: It verifies that the Windows Installer Service is running or not.
e) Reboot check: This is to ensure that there are no pending files from a previous attempt at the
install or any locked files or processes that would hinder with the install.
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Feature Selection
Once the configuration check is over, you will then get the feature selection screen as shown in Figure 6
below.
Figure 6: Feature Selection Screen
As the name suggests, you choose the features that you wish to install and where you want the shared
components to reside on the disk. When you select a particular feature, a helpful hint/description is
presented to you in the right pane.
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Instance Configuration
Once the features that you need to be installed have been selected, the next step in the process is the
configuration of the instance. You will be presented with the screen as shown below in Figure 7.
Figure 7: Instance Configuration Screen
As you can see from above, this was a clean brand new install and we did not have any default instance
on the box. Had we had a default instance, that option would have been grayed out and we would have
been forced to create a named instance instead. In this particular screen, we went with the Default
Instance and choose the instance root directory.
The Instance ID that you see on this screen is the name of the instance. This is used to help identify the
installation directories and registry keys for the instance of SQL Server.
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Server Configuration
After the instance configuration options have been selected, we will be presented with the Server
Configuration screen as shown below in Figure 8.
Figure 8: Server Configuration
In server configuration, we can specify the accounts that can be used to run the different services – the
main database engine service, the SSIS service, SQL Server Agent service etc. and we can also choose to
use the same account for all of them. In addition, we can choose to disable the service or make the
startup automatic or manual.
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Figure 9: Setting up the accounts in Server Configuration
For the different services that are present in SQL Server, read our blog post here:
http://decipherinfosys.wordpress.com/2007/07/10/sql-server-2005-services/
That post was written for SQL Server 2005 but the services remain essentially the same with one
exception – there is no SQL Server Notification Services in SQL Server 2008.
Under the collation tab, you can choose to specify the non-default collations. We are going with the
default in this case since it is a typical US install.
Database Engine Configuration
Once the Server Configuration Options have been specified, we will be presented with the Database
Engine Configuration Screen as shown in Figure 10 below.
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Figure 10: Database Engine Configuration
On the Database Engine Configuration Screen, under the Account Provisioning tab, you can specify the
security mode (mixed or windows authentication mode) and enter the password if you go with the
mixed mode. Since in the beginning we did not provide any sysadmin account, it gave us a warning at
the top. If you just want to add the account under which you are running the install, you can simply click
on the “Add Current User” tab and add that account as a SQL Server Admin account or you can also
choose to add other accounts as well by clicking on the Add button.
On the second tab then (as shown in Figure 11 below), you can specify the non-default data directories
for the different directories needed for the install. One thing to make sure of is that these directories
that you choose should be specific to this instance so in other words, if we were installing a named
instance and a default as well as other named instances already existed on this machine, then these
directories that we choose over here should be specific to this fresh new install.
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Figure 11: Database Engine Configuration – Data Directories tab
On the third tab (as shown in Figure 12 below), you can then choose to enable the new option
FILESTREAM and you need to then specify the Windows Share name for the file I/O streaming access.
If you want to read more on FILESTREAM, you can read our blog post on that topic:
http://decipherinfosys.wordpress.com/2007/12/17/filestream-data-in-sql-server-2008/
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Figure 12: Database Engine Configuration – FILESTREAM tab
Analysis Services Configuration
The next screen that is presented in the install is the configuration of the Analysis Services (since we
choose to install it, if you had chosen not to install it, you will not get this screen). On this configuration
screen, we can:
a) Add the users that have the admin privileges for Analysis Services (just like we did for the
database engine configuration in the previous step),
b) Specify the non-default location of the Data Directories. Same comment about the directories
being specific to this instance in the event of a multi-instance installation applies here as well.
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Figure 13: Analysis Services Configuration – Account Provisioning
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Figure 14: Analysis Services Configuration: Non-Default Data Directories
Reporting Services Configuration
The next step in the install is the configuration of Reporting Services as shown below in Figure 15. In this
screen, one can configure to run reporting services in one of the three modes:
a) Native Mode.
b) Sharepoint Mode – this is very useful when you are using an install specifically for a Sharepoint
Application.
c) You can choose to install RS but not configure it. One can then choose to configure it later on
using the RS configuration tools.
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Figure 15: Reporting Services Configuration Screen
We will choose the native mode default configuration and proceed for this particular install.
Error and Usage Reporting
We are sure that all of you know what this screen is used for. This was also present in the SQL Server
2005 install as well. You can decide to send error reports as well as the feature usage report to
Microsoft if you wish to do so. It just helps them to provide better support services to you as well as
also allows them to see which features are getting used by the SQL Server Community. It is completely
voluntary.
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Figure 16: Error and Usage Reporting Screen
Ready to Install
The name says it all, doesn’t it ☺ After all the information has been verified and collected, the installer
will present to you a “Ready to Install” screen in which you can verify the components that you have
chosen to install and then click the Install button as shown in Figure 17 below.
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Figure 17: Ready to Install Screen
You will then see the installation progress for the different components as shown in Figure 18. The
process also maintains this information in the log files in case the install goes bad. Reading of the log
files even when the install is successful is recommended since it helps in understanding what goes on
behind the scenes during the install.
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Figure 18: Installation Progress screen
Once the installation is done, you will get another screen which indicates whether a particular
component was successfully installed or did it fail. If it failed, in the next screen you will be pointed to
the location of the different logs pertaining to the install and further analysis will be needed to see why
a particular component failed and then one can run with the repair option to install that component.
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Figure 19: Installation Progress: Successful install indicated for this run.
After the install is done, you will then get the last screen as shown in Figure 20 below which will give you
the summary information as well as point you to the Summary log and it’s location.
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Figure 20: SQL Server 2008 installation is complete
If at this stage, you are asked to do a reboot, please do so – that should appear in the reboot message
action in the Installation Progress Screen. After a fresh install of SQL Server, it is recommended to do
the reboot.
As you can see from above, our install completed successfully. ☺
Summary
In this whitepaper, we went over the different steps that you need to go through in order to install SQL
Server 2008. We covered those steps one by one and also saw how one can choose the non-default
options, configure the security accounts etc. So, what are you waiting for? Download the CTP, install it
following these instructions and get ready to explore the rich, powerful and user friendly tools, utilities
and features that this version of SQL Server has to offer.
You can read about a lot of those features in another whitepaper from us that we had published some
time ago:
http://decipherinfosys.com/Decipher_SQL_SERVER_2008.doc
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