SQL Server Windows Management Instrumentation failed

The MySQL team has been continuously improving its products on the Windows platform. Along this line, we’ve responded to a request from our users of Workbench on Windows – to provide remote access to Windows Servers using Windows management methods – as an alternative to SSH.

Managing a MySQL server obviously requires access to the target machine, which usually requires elevated rights for certain tasks like restarting the server or manipulating the configuration file on Windows (where this file is in a protected path). For local connections this is mostly not a big deal. However for remote boxes security measures prevent easy manipulation of such essential things like server processes. In this blog post we discuss native Windows management and how it can be used in MySQL Workbench.

MySQL Workbench first introduced remote access via SSH (secure shell), a widely used and well known approach for secure remote access, especially in the Linux world. Microsoft Windows does not come with an in-built SSH server, hence an additional installation is due. For Windows users is SSH quite an unkown land and very often security rules, policies, company restrictions etc. do not allow to add extra software or open access via SSH. Also setting up SSH is non trivial and can be quite a challenge forless technical users. For these reason we have added support for native Windows management, which comes at no extra cost, since it is built into Windows already.

The management we will discuss here is not about how to add users or databases to a MySQL server and things like that. It’s rather about administering the MySQL server Instance that we’ll discuss here – for instance, DBA tasks such as manipulating the MySQL configuration file or controlling the server processes. Windows comes with a universal management layer called WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation). WMI is a very powerful means to query all kind of data from a Windows system (drivers, BIOS, motherboard, performance data etc.) and to manipulate the state of certain components (services, subsystems etc.). If you are going to manage a MySQL installation on a Windows server from a Windows machine (Workbench supports Windows 7) then WMI is the way to go. Due to security restrictions (e.g. UAC) WMI access works best in a domain setup as it already has all the necessary pieces to make the interplay work seamlessly. At the end of the article I have included additional information to help when setting up native Windows management for non-domain environments. However beware as that involves disabling some important UACs, which is not advisable in most instances.