Large Scale Deployment Overview

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One of the strengths of SQL FineBuild is the ability to deploy standardised builds of SQL Server to a large number of machines. This section describes how these deployments can be done and suggests an architecture that can be used.

When SQL Server is deployed on to a number of servers, the best practice is to identify a set of server roles and store these details in a Site SQL Files Folder. The organisation should also use separate Development, Test and Production Environments.

The servers that form a given role should all be built in the same way. Each organisation will have its own unique server roles, and the examples below show some roles that can be adapted as required. Each role file would contain the FineBuild parameters that define the role, so that all servers in a given role can be built with the same configuration.

In addition to the role file, a separate install file will normally be created for each SQL instance that is to be installed, which would also be stored in the Site SQL Files Folder. As shown by the Developer Workstation Role, it is useful to be pragmatic about when separate files for each SQL instance are used, compared to running the role file directly.

Details of the parameters used in the Role Files are given in FineBuild Parameter Inventory. Site-specific items can be configured automatically by SQL FineBuild, see AutoConfig Processing for details.

The following terms are used throughout the discussion on Large Scale Deployment:

Item	Description
Scale Up	Increasing the Core Count and Memory for a given instance of SQL Server
Scale Out	Distributing the SQL Server workload over a number of Windows instances
Line of Business (LoB) workload	The resources an organisation needs to process its day to day business
Business Continuity Operations (BCO)	Provision of LoB capability at an alternative location when the primary data centre is not useable
SQL Server Licencing	The Microsoft Licensing requirements for implementing the chosen environment
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)	A measurement of time between a disruption event and the most recently available LoB data available at an alternative data centre. This time difference is the amount of data loss that a business is willing to tolerate
Recovery Time Objective (RTO)	The measurement of time between a disruption event and being able to continue LoB operations at an alternative data centre
Service Level Agreement (SLA)	The 'contract' between the Technical Team and the Business Users on what level of service should be provided in various circumstances
Service Tiers	The relative importance to the Business of a given database and application. Best Practice recommends that applications are grouped into Tiers (eg Gold, Silver, Bronze) with each tier having specific SLA objectives for performance, RPO and RTO

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