Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) is a management tool integrated in Windows Server 2008 R2 used to scan server roles according to Microsoft best practice guidelines.
Included in the initial release for Windows Server 2008 R2 are the following BPA models:
- Active Directory Domain Services
- Active Directory Certificate Services
- Domain Name System (DNS) Server
- Remote Desktop Services
- Web Server (IIS)
Since then several new BPA models are released and available both as separate downloads as well as through Windows Update:
- Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS)
- Application Server
- DHCP
- File Services
- Hyper-V
- Network Policy Server (NPS)
- Windows Server Update Services (WSUS)
At the time of this writing, a BPA model for 12 of 17 server roles in Windows Server 2008 R2 are available.
The 5 that are not available are:
- Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS)
- Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS)
- Fax Server
- Print and Document Services
- Windows Deployment Services
In Server Manager, a BPA summary are available for each installed server role that an BPA Model exists for:
When looking at the properties for an item in BPA you get more information as well as a link to Microsoft TechNet where more information are available for the specific subject:
BPA are built as a PowerShell module, meaning that a PowerShell cmdlet (Invoke-BPAModel) are run in the background when you scan a server role from Server Manager:
This is a great feature to examine if your server roles are configured according to Microsoft`s best practices, however, if you got many servers it will take some time to log on to each server and scan each server role. In addition you don`t get any centralized reporting this way.
Since BPA are based upon Windows PowerShell it`s possible to solve this using the BPA PowerShell module and PowerShell remoting:
I`ve created a sample script to accomplish this, named Invoke-BPAModeling, with the following functionality:
- Invoke BPA for all available server roles on specified remote servers
- E-mail reporting
- File reporting to CSV and HTML
You need to customize the initial variables on the top of the script. You can enable/disable reporting using these variables, as well as specify which servers to work against, SMTP server for e-mail reporting and paths to CSV/HTML reports.
By default, only items with a severity of “Error” and “Warning” are reported. You can change this to also include “Informational” severities by configuring IncludeAllSeverities to true.
On the server running the script from, the Active Directory module for PowerShell must be installed if you want to retrieve computer names from Active Directory. In the sample, the script are configured to retrieve all computer accounts listed with Windows Server 2008 R2 as operating system.
You might choose alternate methods, like importing the computer names from a csv-file.
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I would recommend that you approve the new BPA models mentioned at the beginning of this blog post in WSUS prior to running the script.
The script requires that PowerShell remoting are enabled and configured on the remote servers. Also note that there is a known issue with the BPA module; When the PowerShell execution policy are set to any other than “Undefined” or “Unrestricted” , an error occurs. I`ll update this blog-post as soon as a fix are provided from Microsoft.
When the script executes, it displays the progress based upon the total number of computers running against:
Sample e-mail report containing both CSV and HTML reports as attachment:
Sample HTML-report:
Sample CSV-report converted to an Excel spreadsheet:
Feel free to customize the script for your needs, as well as suggest improvements.
Resources
Best Practices Analyzer on Microsoft TechNet
Windows Management and Scripting 