Service Providers

A year ago I flew into Charolette and drove to Stateville two solid packed days of taking over a small business for a client that bought it.

I saw basically nothing. So I am no help.

@JaredBusch said in Installing MS SQL Server 2017 Express on CentOS 7.4:

@scottalanmiller said in Installing MS SQL Server 2017 Express on CentOS 7.4:

@JaredBusch said in Installing MS SQL Server 2017 Express on CentOS 7.4:

@scottalanmiller said in Installing MS SQL Server 2017 Express on CentOS 7.4:

After that it is up and running. Worth noting, you will need 4GB of RAM to even fire up the process, which is a tad excessive when you consider that you can run its competition in production with far less RAM than that.

Current docs show only 2GB required. I built the VM with 3GB and 2 vCPU.

@scottalanmiller said in Installing MS SQL Server 2017 Express on CentOS 7.4:

And only XFS and EXT4 filesystems are supported. That means no ZFS, no BtrFS, no JFS2, etc.

Who cares?

A lot of people, especially on places like FreeNAS forums or tend to be very "anti" traditional solid filesystems and are religiously addicted to ZFS and BtrFS or ReFS style filesystems.

I don't care about stupid. Everything RHEL/Fedora defaults to XFS.

No idea what Debian 9 or Ubuntu default to.

EXT4

@scottalanmiller said in Installing MS SQL Server 2017 Express on CentOS 7.4:

@JaredBusch said in Installing MS SQL Server 2017 Express on CentOS 7.4:

@scottalanmiller said in Installing MS SQL Server 2017 Express on CentOS 7.4:

After that it is up and running. Worth noting, you will need 4GB of RAM to even fire up the process, which is a tad excessive when you consider that you can run its competition in production with far less RAM than that.

Current docs show only 2GB required. I built the VM with 3GB and 2 vCPU.

@scottalanmiller said in Installing MS SQL Server 2017 Express on CentOS 7.4:

And only XFS and EXT4 filesystems are supported. That means no ZFS, no BtrFS, no JFS2, etc.

Who cares?

A lot of people, especially on places like FreeNAS forums or tend to be very "anti" traditional solid filesystems and are religiously addicted to ZFS and BtrFS or ReFS style filesystems.

I don't care about stupid. Everything RHEL/Fedora defaults to XFS.

No idea what Debian 9 or Ubuntu default to.

Just found that Yucatan has released on Netflix. Been waiting months to see that. Watching it now.

Just hanging out by myself watching some Netflix.

@JaredBusch said in Installing MS SQL Server 2017 Express on CentOS 7.4:

@scottalanmiller said in Installing MS SQL Server 2017 Express on CentOS 7.4:

After that it is up and running. Worth noting, you will need 4GB of RAM to even fire up the process, which is a tad excessive when you consider that you can run its competition in production with far less RAM than that.

Current docs show only 2GB required. I built the VM with 3GB and 2 vCPU.

@scottalanmiller said in Installing MS SQL Server 2017 Express on CentOS 7.4:

And only XFS and EXT4 filesystems are supported. That means no ZFS, no BtrFS, no JFS2, etc.

Who cares?

A lot of people, especially on places like FreeNAS forums or tend to be very "anti" traditional solid filesystems and are religiously addicted to ZFS and BtrFS or ReFS style filesystems.

If anyone is curious, you do not have to tell it to start on boot as the setup step does that. You can see it linking the service in the screenshot.

Microsoft makes this super easy, and @scottalanmiller has posted about this once back in 2017.

First, as always when I write something, start with the minimal install. In this case of CentOS 7 as Microsoft only supports the LTS model.

Second, make sure your system is fully up to date.

yum update -y

Note: You do not need the EPEL.

Now you are ready to go.

Go get the SQL Server repository from Microsoft.

sudo curl -o /etc/yum.repos.d/mssql-server.repo https://packages.microsoft.com/config/rhel/7/mssql-server-2017.repo

Install SQL Server with yum

sudo yum install -y mssql-server

Then as instructed run the setup wizard.

sudo /opt/mssql/bin/mssql-conf setup

You will be prompted to choose your version.

Choose the version you want. For this guide we are selecting 3) Express.

You will then have to agree to the license terms.

Now enter the sa user password you want for SQL Server

The sa account is equivalent to the root account in MariaDB/MySQL

You should see it was successfully completed.

That's it, you are up and running.

While you may be up and running now, you will also need to do a few more things to make it useful.

Allow inbound connections through the firewall to the server if needed.

In my case, I will have a remote server talking to this and I use Azure Data Studio form a Linux Desktop to access this.

sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=1433/tcp --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Add the Microsoft command line tools so you can locally manage the instance.

This is a separate repository file from SQL Server itself.

sudo curl -o /etc/yum.repos.d/msprod.repo https://packages.microsoft.com/config/rhel/7/prod.repo

Install the tools.

sudo yum install -y mssql-tools unixODBC-devel

There are again license agreements to be agreed to.

If you want to use the tools without typing the full bath, add them to your path.

echo 'export PATH="$PATH:/opt/mssql-tools/bin"' >> ~/.bash_profile
echo 'export PATH="$PATH:/opt/mssql-tools/bin"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

You now have access to sqlcmd

You can connect to the local instance like this. You will be prompted for your password.

sqlcmd -U sa

You can pass the password with the -P parameter.

sqlcmd -U sa -P 'YourSuperSecretPassword'

Note the single quotes. I always use them to ensure even if you have a special character, that the password is accepted when passed this way.

@scottalanmiller said in Installing MS SQL Server 2017 Express on CentOS 7.4:

After that it is up and running. Worth noting, you will need 4GB of RAM to even fire up the process, which is a tad excessive when you consider that you can run its competition in production with far less RAM than that.

Current docs show only 2GB required. I built the VM with 3GB and 2 vCPU.

@scottalanmiller said in Installing MS SQL Server 2017 Express on CentOS 7.4:

And only XFS and EXT4 filesystems are supported. That means no ZFS, no BtrFS, no JFS2, etc.

Who cares?

@travisdh1 said in Dropping a black box on a client network:

@JaredBusch Hardware wise, xByte is the only 3rd party I'd trust for anything going into production. A Supermicro is going to start at $1,500, which is a good deal for a new server.

That said, if you just want to cheap out, I got my current Home Lab box from Orange Computers. No factory warranty, and I have no idea how good the support is if it's needed.

I would never do something without a warranty of some type in this kind of scenario.