Implementing New Manageability Features and Practices - Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Administration - page 295

7. The second tab All will display all the best practices that were analyzed in addition to
the noncompliant best practices list.
8. As we can see six errors and ten warnings, when we click on the listed error
or warning, a brief explanation of the issue will be displayed, which shows the
noncompliance reason.
9. Furthermore, a More information link will be presented that opens a web page with
an explanation of the issue. The web page that opens is originated from the Microsoft
Support knowledge base articles site.
10. This is the starting point to evaluate the existing environment and analyze the
required instances to see whether best practices implementation is followed or not.
All the errors that are displayed from the BPA report must be addressed without any
further delay.
This completes the process to implement SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer in an
existing environment.
How it works...
The SQL Server 2008 R2 BPA tool scans both local computer and remote computers including
the specified SQL Server instance. The underlying scan is performed by the PowerShell service
that requires support for PowerShell remoting features and increases the maximum number
of concurrent shells for a user.
The process is straightforward as BPA tool will start the WinRM service by setting the service
to Automatic. It creates a listener component to accept requests on any IP address and also
enables a firewall exception for WS-Management communication that will allow all registered
Windows PowerShell session configurations to receive instructions from a remote computer.
A session configuration named Microsoft.PowerShell is registered to enable the WinRM
service to make all preceding changes effective.
Finally, the tool gathers all the information about a server (operating system) and instance
(SQL Server) to determine if the configurations are set according to the recommended best
practices. All the information and noncompliance are reported, indicating settings that differ
from recommendations. The report is highly essential to indicate all the potential problems in
the installed instance of the SQL Server, and the detailed explanation of the error or warning
recommends the solution to the user by referring to those Microsoft knowledge base articles.
For more information on the BPA tool that needs to be installed on a standalone
machine, refer to the following blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/psssql/
archive/2010/06/21/known-issues-installing-sql-2008-r2-bpa-relating-
to-remoting.aspx .