Managed Service Accounts and SQL2008R2

• jasona.work

  SSC Guru

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  March 2, 2015 at 10:46 am

  #295674

  We have a policy which requires annual changes of our service account passwords. Most all my SQL Servers are using domain accounts for at least the SQL Server service (although I'm starting to think I may be able to change this in the future.)

  I got to thinking that Managed Service Accounts (MSA) might be the way to go, the AD team creates the account and assigns it to the appropriate server, I make it the SQL service account and never have to worry about the password again...

  But, in searching on this, it seems MSAs aren't supported with SQL2008.

  So, a couple questions:

  1. Is it the case that MS does not support MSAs with SQL2008? Most of what I found seems to indicate that no they do not, and you cannot specify a MSA during setup of SQL2008.

  2. Even if MS doesn't support them with SQL2008, will they work with SQL2008, presuming all the other conditions are met (AD level, OS and OS features, etc)?

  Moving forward, as we sllooowwwwlllyy migrate to SQL2012, I'm thinking I'm going to set up my systems with virtual service accounts to start, and if require move to local and then domain accounts as needed (We currently don't cluster, we're using VMs for SQL)

  Thanks,

  Jason