Installing SharePoint Server 2010

Hi folks, this time I thought of writing down my SharePoint 2010 Server installation experience, as for me it was a kind of Herculean task which took an entire day to get this thing up and running. During the installation process, I came to face lots and lots of glitches and hurdles that, at some point of time I was on the brink of giving up and thought of passing it on to some one who is good at it. But my instinct and passion pulled me from giving up and kept me trying until the result was achieved. For this, I did spend a whole long day and finally, I came to see light at the end of the tunnel, which I would say that, it was a moment of ecstasy filled with pride and joy on successfully completing on what ever I had started off with.

I will list down the steps and points, which I came to learn while installing SharePoint Server 2010. Following is a high level view of the steps involved, if you were to start from scratch.

1. Windows Server 2008 R2 installation
2. NIC Configuration, Domain Creation
3. Installing features in Windows Server 2008 R2 using Server Manager
4. Active Directory
5. AD user creation
6. Firewall configuration
7. SQL Server 2005\2008 Installation and Configuration
8. SharePoint Server 2010 Installation and configuration
9. IE configuration 
10. VS.NET 2010 Installation Professional
11. Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus Installation

Before starting off with the installation, here's a couple of prerequisites\checks to be done.

1. You need to have a system at least with the following hardware configuration or more.
   a) Dual Core with 2+ Ghz (Recommended Quad Core with 3 GHz)
   b) 6GB RAM (Recommended DDR3 8GB RAM)
   c) 500 GB HDD 7500 RPM (Recommended Solid State Drive, as this could dramatically improve the system performance.)
   
   
2. Software requirements
   a) Make sure the software installations for Server OS, SQL Server are of 64-bit editions.(except for VS.NET 2010 and Office 2010).
   b) You need to have Windows Server 2008 SP2, in case if you are not having the Windows Server 2008 R2 release.
   c) You need to have SQL Server 2008 SP2, in case if you are not having the Windows Server 2008 R2 release.
   
   
3. Download this document(from SharePoint-Tutorial.NET) and take a print of that or you could open a copy of this in a near by system or laptop to refer during installation. This is pretty good document which covers installation & configuration of Win2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2 and SharePoint Server. (I wished I had this document while I was installing SharePoint)

I had installed and configured all of the applications on a single workstation, while in the document, they are using two workstations one for SharePoint and the other for SQL Server. If you have the luxury of getting two workstations for your disposal then go for that, else no problem in installing both on the same server. The advantage with installing SQL Server on a different server will help you to gain some performance by offloading the SQL Services to another machine.


Lessons Learnt

1. After installing SQL Server turn off all firewall policies and disable firewall.  Now try connecting to the database from SQL Server Management Studio, if the connection is established thank god, you had cleared one hurdle. For me, the firewall created a hell lot of problems while installing SharePoint. During installation, I was at the step where I had to fill in SQL Server end point details for creating the SharePoint configuration database. But what ever I do, SharePoint was reporting that it cannot connect\find to SQL Server.
   
   
2. Make sure you install all of the following pre-requisite components before SharePoint 2010 Server  installation, else you will end up with "Correlation ID" errors, which is hard to track like what went wrong. The difficult thing with the following components are, at times these components are not packaged with SharePoint, instead you had to download all these yourself.
   a) ADOMD.NET
   b) DOTNET 3.5 SP1
   c) Microsoft Office 2010 Filter pack (64-bit)
   d) Microsoft Sync Framework v1.0 (x64)
   e) MSChart
   f) SpeechPlatformRuntime(x64)
   g) Windows Identity  Foundation
   
   
3. Once all the installation and configuration is complete, apply the following settings in Internet Explorer. This will help you to pass the credentials of your choice instead of passing the credentials of the logged in username.
   a) Open IE
   b) Open Tools-> Internet Options
   c) Click "Security" tab.
   d) Select "Local Intranet" and click the button "Custom Level".
   e) In "Security Settings" dialog, scroll to the bottom where you will see a category named "User Authentication". There select the option "Prompt for username and password". Click "OK" and close the window.
   f) Now do the same for "Internet" and "Trusted Sites".
   
   
4. In the document, the initial step itself they are mentioning to add you system to the domain, which itself is not going to work if you trying it on a personal system. The reason being, the steps to create and configure the AD(Active Directory) is not yet done.
   
   
5. If you are trying SharePoint 2010 on your personal machine without being connected to any networks. Chances are that you will encounter a "TCP\IP Configuration" error while configuring AD. I got this resolved by connecting a network cable to the NIC. The NIC was configured with a static IP.

By the way after seeing this huge list of items, if you are a bit concerned like how to get all these softwares or doesn't feel confident to configure all this yourself, then here's a Virtual Machine(VM) image provided by Microsoft. This  is a Hyper-V image, which can be downloaded by clicking this link. You need to download all the files starting with "2010-7a" and the download itself is around 15 GB. The VM image is prepackaged and configured with all required softwares. 

A word of caution, if you planning to setup Hyper-V on a laptop, then I would recommend going through these links which does cover on how to get this done. Hyper-V on a Laptop (Part1, Part2, Part3)

In case if you come across more hurdles which wasn't mentioned over here, then please feel free to drop in a comment on that. I will be updating the article with your inputs and that too including your name.