Now that I have a domain controller, I can start adding SQL servers. The first thing I need to do is to create another clone from my template. I did so, and named that new server SQL01. Before I start up this server, however, I want to add additional drives, so I can follow best practices of isolating the MDF, LDF, tempdb, and backup files. For a lab, it may seem a little like overkill, but I want to set up automated SQL installs, so having all of my disk partitions set up ahead of time is worth the effort for me.
To accomplish this, open up the VirtualBox console. I right-click on the newly created image, and select Settings (or highlight the server and click the Settings gear icon). I select the Storage page, and I see the currently allocated disk.
Here I want to click on Controller:SATA and then click the ‘plus’ icon on the right side.
This will bring up a dialog that asks is I want to create a new disk or use an existing one.
I want to create a new one, so I click on that choice. The subsequent dialogs are the same ones that were presented when I created my first server. I am making some different choices here, specifically using much smaller disks (200 MB). I have named all of the disks SQL01_xxx.
Once I have created one disk, I repeat the process for the other three additional ones.
So I now have a server with 5 disks. One already formatted with the OS on it, and 4 blank ones. When I start up the server, I see the same Out-of-box experience that I did when I created the domain controller. I am not going to repeat them here, except to say that I named this server SQL01.
Once the server is up and running, I set up the network so that the DNS server is my domain controller. I can then join the server to the domain, and then I reboot. After the reboot, I need to mount those additional disks. To accomplish this task, I need to open Computer Management, and then expand the lowest node, Storage. Once that is expanded, I can click on Disk Management. Windows detects the new disks and asks me to initialize them. I select the defaults and select ‘OK’
I format all of the disks as P:, Q:, R:, and S:, and label them as SQLData, SQLLogs, tempDB, and SQLBackup. Guess what I am planning to do with them? Of course, I don’t have SQL installed yet – that is for Part 2.