I had the chance to catch Brent Ozar's webcast last week on creating a poor man's CMDB. In it he talked at length about the Central Management Server feature in SQL 2008. While I use SSMS 2008 my only SQL 2008 database installs so far are running inside Virtual PCs that aren't always on. Fortunately, there is another option – SQL 2008 Express. It's lightweight, free, and best of all it can be used as a CMS. The only catch is that if you put your install on anything other than your local machine (which you're going to do since you're using it as a CMS, otherwise what's the point?) you'll have to enable remote connections. No worries, it's actually an easy task to do – just follow these step by step instructions and you'll be all set.
Update – It didn't take me long after I posted this to realize that there are cases for running SQL Express locally in order to take advantage of a CMS. One example is if you frequently run multi-server queries and you want to create logical groups of servers where a server belongs to more than one group. Another is if you're a one person shop and you want to use Brent's CMDB scripts to gather data. That makes me wonder, though – why didn't Microsoft just add the ability to register a server in more than one group into Object Explorer in the first place? Hmm, I smell a Connect request cooking!
Update 2 – OK I am a dolt. In my first update I meant to say Registered Servers, not Object Explorer. I've posted a correction here.
About Kendal
Kendal is a database strategist, community advocate, public speaker, and blogger. A practiced IT professional with over 15 years of SQL Server experience, Kendal excels at disaster recovery, high availability planning/implementation, & debugging/troubleshooting mission critical SQL Server environments. Kendal is a Senior Consultant on the Microsoft Premier Developer Support team and President of MagicPASS, the Orlando, FL based chapter of PASS. Before joining Microsoft, Kendal was a SQL Server/Data Platform MVP from 2011-2016.
3 comments
sure you can add the same server into more than one group in registered servers. but why would you want to open the same server twice in OE?
Good point, I meant to say Registered Servers, and I'm doubly wrong because you can register a server more than once as long as it's in different groups. I posted a correction (link above).
Kendal - You can also register a server multiple times in the same group as long as you use different Registered Server Names. http://tinyurl.com/dx4qdb and http://tinyurl.com/cwqsan
Mladen - I've done that before where I've got a server registered using an sa account, and I also have the same server registered using s specific sql login with limited permisisons for testing purposes.
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