In general, what you will see depends on what features you selected during the installation wizard. However, that’s not the case if you spend a bit of time on it and just explore it for a moment, so here is an idea for you – generate one such file on your machine, take a look at it and move on reading the remaining part of the article after that. At first glance it could even be a bit confusing.

Here is how the file itself looks like and what you will find in there:Īs you can see from the file, there are a lot of parameters in here. Here is where it is located – the same directory as the installer actually points you to. What we are interested in on this screen is that “Configuration file path” field because that ConfigurationFile.ini file is actually the file that we are about to use for our installations. Let’s see what this means by actually using a both SQL Server 2012 and SQL Server 2014 media.Įvery single time you are on your way to deploy a new instance, you go through the SQL installation wizard and at one point, just before you hit the “Install” button, you will be presented with a screen like this one: The so called method of “unattended install” is here to save you. In both cases you want to install them as like they are created from a template, but you don’t want to lose time and go on each and every server, going through the next-next wizard in order to complete the request.

In this blog post I want to somehow enhance what we learned in that previous blog post by actually allowing ourselves to install SQL Server without even seeing the installation wizard! So imagine the following scenario – you work for an organization where everything should be standardized or probably you have 10 new SQL instances to be installed because of a business requirement. I seriously believe it could be a game changer for you and how you do some of your work. That process is called slipstreaming and it’s a huge timesaver, so if you missed it, jumpĪnd take a look at it. In my first article, we talked about how we can make our SQL Server installation include every single patch and hotfix we plan to install.

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