Installing SharePoint Server 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2 - Part 1: Overview

I need a new development environment for SharePoint 2010 so I decided to install SharePoint Server 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2. But before we try to install SharePoint for our development environment let's think about why this process is the most important step in the development cycle and why you should take the time to carefully prepare your installation. It helps to prevent problems later on.

Let's imagine you or your customer has a problem with a custom solution and you need to find the reason for that. Since SharePoint is such a big product there are almost hundreds of possible problems: Maybe you made a mistake during your development or your environment was set up in a wrong way. So how do you know? Why should you waste your time checking a lot of different solutions which may not work or even aren't related to your problem? Well research takes time and time costs money... you already know.

It's also possible that you don't realize an error if you have set up your development environment without least privileges and your customer has. Code which runs with enhanced privileges in your environment may not run in your customers environment. As you know usually you can't take Visual Studio, install it at your customers production environment and start the debugger. That's why I have written this article which explains how to install SharePoint to have a great base for your own development.

This guide starts with the installation of Windows Server 2008 R2 and after that the configuration depending on your needs. The installation of an Active Directory is described as well as the configuration of the Web Server role including Internet Information Services (IIS) and the Application Server role. Usually you don't need to install an Active Directory since your company or your customer has one. The idea behind that is a completely closed development environment which has no dependencies and works everywhere.

Later on we discuss the accounts needed and why we only need to manually assign permission to a few of them. After that the installation of SQL Server is described as well as the configuration of SQL Server. With the SQL Server as the last requirement you are able to install SharePoint 2010 and after the successful installation you are able to do the remaining configuration steps.

Install SharePoint 2010 - Administrators and Developers Edt.

• Fully Automated or Step-by-Step
• Service Application Configuration
• Accounts and Permission Planning
• Troubleshooting Tips
• 46 PowerShell Scripts, 80p. PDF

 

See 12 steps you won't find in this article...

Please leave a comment if things aren't clear or if you have additional information about the installation and configuration process I missed. Right now there are a lot of comments by different readers which discuss problems they had and tips they have. By the way at the end are the resources used so you can check by yourself.

I have split the whole process into different parts:

1. Overview and hardware requirements
2. Windows Server 2008 R2 software requirements
3. Windows Server 2008 R2 configuration
   • Web Server (IIS) role and Application Server role including .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
   • SharePoint 2010 software prerequisites
   • Pop3, SMTP, Outlook
4. Active Directory installation and configuration
5. Administrative and service accounts
6. SQL Server 2008 R2 software requirements
7. SQL Server 2008 R2 installation and configuration
8. SharePoint Server 2010 installation
9. SharePoint Server 2010 configuration
   • Diagnostic logging
   • Usage and health data collection
   • Outgoing e-mail 

Update: Additionally over time I have written the following install SharePoint articles which might be interesting to you:

1. Installing SharePoint Server 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2 - Updated
2. Install SharePoint - Or a wrap up of my SharePoint 2010 installation guide
3. How to install SharePoint in real world
4. Install SharePoint - Configure Web Analytics service application using PowerShell

If you see this picture in your browser we are done.

If you need to install SharePoint 2007 on Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 you can use the following articles:

• Installing MOSS 2007 on Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 - Part 1: Overview

Overview

Since I don’t own a laptop with 8GB Ram I decided to set up a small single-tier SharePoint Server 2010 farm using Hyper-V. After I get a new one I will separate the SQL Server from the application and front-end Web servers.

But that’s a different story and for now I have the following farm topology:

Hardware requirements

You shouldn't mess with the hardware requirements of SharePoint in general and SharePoint 2010 in detail.

Recommendations by Microsoft needs to be respected.

This part is very short since it applies to

• a single server with built-in database and
• server farm installations including a single server or multiple servers.

So according to Microsoft TechNet [1] you need:

• Processor
  Beta: 64-bit, dual processor, 3 GHz
  RTM: 64-bit, four cores
• RAM
  4 GB for stand-alone or evaluation installation and 8 GB for single server and multiple server farm installation for production use
• Hard disk
  80 GB
• Other
  DVD drive

The requirement for 64-bit hardware and software was announced earlier in 2009 and therefore you need to use at least a Windows Server 2008 64-bit installation.

Resources

Here are the resources used in this article:

• [1] Determine hardware and software requirements

Next steps

• Please take a look at Part 2: Hardware and software requirements

Learn more about SharePoint 2010 Installation