Installing SQL 2008 R2 on 2008 R2 Server Core

Following on from previous posts on a similar theme, I wanted to make a quick note of how SQL 2008 R2 is installed on a 2008 R2 Server Core VM.

SQL 2008 R2 has a number of feature dependencies that must be present before an installation can take place. Assuming that you've deployed your VM, given it some network settings and joined it to your domain (if you want) then there are three further things you need to address to get SQL installed.

The first is adding some disk space to the VM. If, like me, you deploy Windows server VMs with a reasonable 40Gb of C: drive space you'll need to add something to have enough room for SQL and some databases. I like to keep databases and log files on separate drives to the main OS so I tend to add extra disks to the VM. I've covered that off in a previous post.

Next up – those pesky dependencies. You could do this remotely with Server Manager running on another machine somewhere or you could just use the command line. Hint: if you've got the commands written down somewhere then the command line is so much quicker. Just RDP to your 2008 R2 Server Core VM and paste the following into the command prompt:

[text]dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx2-ServerCore
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx3-ServerCore
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx2-ServerCore-WOW64
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx3-ServerCore-WOW64
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:IIS-WebServerRole
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:IIS-ISAPIFilter
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:IIS-ISAPIExtensions
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:IIS-NetFxExtensibility
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:IIS-ASPNET[/text]

The final stage is installing SQL itself. Simply mount the DVD ISO and run setup! Note though that I think SQL 2008 may not be supported on Server 2008 Core versions. SQL 2012 seems to be but I haven't played with that yet.