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Part I: Laying the Foundations
■ (^) What is the expected growth in workload for the next 12 to 24 months?
■ What is your availability and disaster recovery service-level agreement (SLA)?
The answers to these questions are important to gain a better understanding of your hard-
ware needs and to plan accordingly. You need to invest the time to capture these baseline
utilization metrics and statistics. Chapter 43, “Management Data Warehouse,” discusses
how to confi gure Master Data Warehouse (MDW) to capture these and many other important
resource utilization trends and statistics for SQL Server 2012.
What’s New with Installation in SQL Server 2012
SQL Server 2012 installation introduces a few changes in the options and features available, including
the following:
■ Analysis Services mode: During the installation process you are now prompted to choose
the deployment mode of Analysis Services, Tabular or Multidimensional mode.
■ Reporting Services for SharePoint and binaries: The option to install Reporting Services
for SharePoint is now separate than Reporting Services Native Mode. A separate option to
install only the Reporting Services binaries for SharePoint is also available.
■ AlwaysOn Availability Groups: This option enables the new High Availability feature in
SQL Server 2012 that allows to failover a group of databases together.
Preparing the Server
Before you initiate the SQL Server 2012 installation process there are several
pre-installation tasks that need to be completed to guarantee a successful SQL Server
2012 deployment. Some of the pre-installation tasks include verifying that the hardware,
software, and network confi gurations are optimal to deploy SQL Server 2012 as well as
having a good understanding of the SQL Server 2012 editions and the hardware and feature
limitations imposed on each edition.This section discusses planning and design considerations for a successful SQL Server 2012
deployment.Hardware and Software Requirements
An important step to defi ne hardware requirements is to make sure all the minimum
hardware, software, and operating system requirements are met for a successful SQL
Server 2012 installation. This step is critical in order to pass hardware validation
checks during installation process and to ensure that performance and response time
requirements are met. Table 3-1 lists the minimum hardware, software, and operating
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