Managing the Core Database Engine - Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Administration - page 92

As a best practice, it is ideal to create individual groups within CMS to enable a single-query
execution against multiple servers as in the following screenshot:
SQL Server 2008 R2 provides a 'Policy Based Management framework' that consists of
multiple sets of policy files that you can import as best practice policies. You can then
evaluate the policies against a target set that includes instances, instance objects, databases,
or database objects. You can evaluate policies manually, set policies to evaluate a target set
according to a schedule, or set policies to evaluate a target set according to an event.
To evaluate a policy complete the following steps:
1. To evaluate the policy against multiple configuration targets in the SQL Server
Management Studio, click on the View menu to select Registered Servers and
expand the Central Management Server.
2. Right-click on the Production server group and click on Evaluate Policies.
3. The Evaluate Policies screen will be presented as shown in the next screenshot.
4. Click on Source to Choose Source.
5. The relevant best practices policies are stored as XML files under %:\
Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Policies\
DatabaseEngine\1033 directory, which is shown in the next screenshot:
For this recipe, we have chosen to select the policy from SQL
Server 2008 R2 Best Practices Analyzer that is downloaded
from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/
details.aspx?FamilyID=0fd439d7-4bff-4df7-
a52f-9a1be8725591 and installed on the server.