Comparing Configurations using CM/Config
One of the most remarkable features of Embarcadero’s Change Manager is that you can use it to compare server configurations. This again demonstrates the target audience for this tool. Administrators working in large server farm environments will undoubtedly highly value this feature as it is just a matter of minutes to compare one or more target server against a master server.
The GUI interface for configuration comparison jobs is almost the same as the one for data comparison job. Therefore in this chapter I will concentrate on the functionality rather than the GUI.
The first notable difference is the “Select Standard” link. Change Manager allows you to create standard settings that can be used as a comparison benchmark against other systems. Standards can contain static parameter values that are defined by a user. They can also contain dynamic parameter values that are linked to a particular server that is considered to be s “Standard”, . I will explain how to create such a “Standard” a little bit later on. Next thing you note is that you not only can use live sources, but also archived sources. As this feature needs to be explained in more detail, I will come back to “Archives” in just a moment.
As I mentioned some lines above, you can use Change Manager to compare one source against one or more target servers.
Once source and target(s) have been determined, you need to decide what configuration settings should be included in the comparison. The above list illustrates what this list of settings looks like when you run the comparison against SQL Server 2005 instances. All options are checked by default and will be included in the comparison.
That’s all Change Manager needs to know in order to execute the comparison job. Again, you have the option to have a script generated that can be scheduled according to your needs.
In the above screenshot you see the summary of the configuration comparison. As you might guess, the results from comparing a server with itself will never be really meaningful. So to provide a more meaningful example, I have deliberately inserted a screenshot from a Change Manager training presentation, which can be downloaded from the Embarcadero website.
You can easily determine if the target server complies with your source server in terms of configuration or not. And, if so, where both serves diverge in their settings.