Designing Policy Based Management in Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Policy Compliance

Because you cannot set all policies to enforce compliance, you need to check policies manually that cannot be enforced on a regular basis. You view policies that apply to an instance by right-clicking the name of the instance within Object Explorer and selecting Policies, View. You can check policies that apply to an instance by right-clicking the name of the instance within Object Explorer and selecting Policies, Evaluate.

You can check all policies within an instance, as shown in Figure 8-1, by right-clicking the Policies node and selecting Evaluate.

FIGURE 8-1 Evaluate policies

By clicking Evaluate, you execute the policies and review the results, as shown in Figure 8-2.

FIGURE 8-2 Policy check results

EXAM TIP

Defining a condition to be used as a policy target is a critical component to well-defined policies. A policy fails during a check if the object does not conform to the criteria and if the property does not exist. For example, attempting to check that the Web Assistant is disabled against a SQL Server 2008 instance fails because the feature does not exist.

Central Management Server

Policy Based Management would be limited to SQL Server 2008 and be very tedious if you had to do any of the following:

• Duplicate policies on every instance

• Create subscriptions to each instance in your environment individually

• Check compliance for each instance individually

Within the Registered Servers pane in SSMS, you can configure a Central Management Server. Underneath the Central Management Server, you can create multiple levels of folders, and register instances into the appropriate folder. After you have the Central Management Server structure set up in SSMS, you can evaluate polices against a specific instance, folder, or all instances underneath the Central Management Server. Figure 8-3 shows an example of a Central Management Server.

FIGURE 8-3 Central Management Server