Recently I tried to install SharePoint 2013 in my test environment based on the multiple servers for a three-tier farm scenario, where my SQL Server is on another machine and I got the following error during SharePoint 2013 Products Configuration Wizard:
Failed to create the configuration database
Exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: This SQL Server instance does not have the required “max degree of parallelism” setting of 1. Database provisioning operations will continue to fail if “max degree of parallelism” is not set 1 or the current account does not have permissions to change the setting. See documentation for details on manually changing the setting.
Max degree of parallelism error
I encountered this during farm creation on the first SharePoint server installation.
Luckily this error message is really helpful and self explanatory.
To remediate this go to your SQL server and in Server Properties under Advanced tab set the Max Degree of Parallelism to 1.
Max degree of parallelism setting in SQL server
If you also follow the official installation guide you should never encounter this error because it says to set this parameter on the SQL server side. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee805948.aspx Note to myself: next time read the documentation more carefully 
If you actually open the mentioned logfile (PSCDiagnostics) you will see the same exception in there:
Psconfig logfile
If you are following official Microsoft guide about the accounts (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee662513.aspx) it is also make sense that your current account cannot change this, because you are using the Setup account which has the following rights:
- administrator on the current machine
- has an sql login on the specified sql instance
- has dbcreator and securityadmin
More information about max degree of parallelism:
- http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188611.aspx
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181007%28v=sql.105%29.aspx
- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2023536
