Using the Debugging Tools Available in Windows Server 2008 R2 (part 1) - Best Practices Analyzer Tools

Best Practices Analyzer Tools

Many years ago, Microsoft introduced Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) tools for server products such as SQL Server and Exchange. The tools would enable an IT professional to conduct a scan against a product to ensure it was configured based upon industry best practices. For many years, IT professionals wanted a similar tool to scan their Windows infrastructure; however, one did not exist. Windows Server 2008 R2 now introduces a Best Practice Analyzer tool, which is included with all editions of the server except for Server Core. When scanning Server Roles to find best-practice violations, the BPA tool will measure a server role’s compliance based upon eight different rule categories. The rule categories include Security, Performance, Configuration, Policy, Operation, Predeployment, Postdeployment, and BPA Prerequisites. Compliance is measured based upon three severity levels: Noncompliant, Compliant, and Warnings. It is worth noting that only a select few server roles are supported with BPA.

Note: The Windows BPA tool should be run on a regular basis to alleviate incorrect configurations, poor performance, poor reliability, and security violations.

Follow these steps to launch the Best Practice Analyzer tool:

1.	Click Start, All Programs, and then select Server Manager.
2.	In the tree pane, expand the Roles section.
3.	Select a server role that you want to scan—for example, Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS).
4.	In the details pane, open the Best Practice Analyzer section and then select Scan This Role.
5.	Once the scan is complete, review the results in the same Best Practices Analyzer section, as displayed in Figure 1. Each result is categorized by Noncompliant, Excluded, Compliant, and All tabs. Figure 1. The Best Practices Analyzer Results screen.

When using the GUI to run a Best Practices Analyzer scan, it is possible to exclude scan results for a specific role. This can be achieved by selecting a result from the Noncompliant, Compliant, or All tabs and then clicking the Exclude link. Alternatively, you can exclude more than one result by holding down the CTRL key, selecting more than one result and then clicking Exclude.