SharePoint 2010 Single Server farm deployment guide

To learn any IT technology you need to be familiar with environment and it is the best way to learn things and practice. Books and reading material can only give you theoretical knowledge but to get practical knowledge you must have hands on technology. Especially students like me who wants to pass Microsoft certifications must have setup practical environment, so that they could understand things better.

In this post I am going to explain how we can setup SharePoint 2010 demo environment and do practice.

I am going to do Single Server farm deployment which is a complete all-in-one installation of SharePoint 2010 and the infrastructure components on a single server. The AD (active directory) and DNS are installed on separate servers.

We are going to setup SharePoint environment with two servers. One server is for our Active Directory, Domain Controller and DNS server, other server is for SharePoint and Database Server.

	SharePoint Server Database Server
	Active Directory DNS

There are SharePoint 2010 deployment steps which I followed.

1. Install the Windows Server OS on a server that will be configured as a domain controller.

2. Install Domain Name System (DNS) on the Windows server

3. Configure DNS.

4. Install Active Directory (AD) on the domain controller.

5. Install another Windows Server OS and install SQL Server on this new server.

6. Install SharePoint 2010

The most important thing to remember about the process of building an environment from scratch to support SharePoint 2010 is that it will depend on Active Directory for all user account objects.

Reference: [SharePoint 2010 Administration by Tom Carpenter James Pyles]

Note: I am using VMWARE to create my demo environment.

Step 1: Install two 64 bit OS, one for Active directory and other one for SharePoint Server

You need the 64-bit edition of one of the following operating system:

·         Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise, Data Center, Web Server or

·         Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard, Enterprise, Data Center, Web Server.

Download links to download Windows R2 https://www.dreamspark.com/

If you are not student then you can download trail version of Windows R2 64 bit from Microsoft site

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd459137

This is screen shot of my AD Server

I am sharing some very good video guides by PCAddictsLive.  How to setup a Windows Domain Controller running Windows Server 2008 R2 and how to setup Active Directory Domain Services and DNS.

Video 1:  About Setup a Domain Controller

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGfwfWcLFMw

Video 2: Setup users and groups within Active Directory

How to setup users and groups within Active Directory Users and Computers. How to setup groups and join users to those groups. How to structure organizational units (OUs).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PelA-_gT2qE&list=PLA32FE7646B8E5A33&index=2&feature=plpp_video

Video 3: Then join the client to the domain

Configure DHCP on the server, boot the client computer up (make sure it received a correct IP and settings from the newly created DHCP server). Then join the client to the domain.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hrhwzN15A4&list=PLA32FE7646B8E5A33&index=3&feature=plpp_video

Using guide from video three I joined my SharePoint Server to domain.

Now at this point our AD Server is ready, DNS Server is running, DHCP server running and our SharePoint Server is on domain portal.local

Screenshot of my SharePoint Server

Step 2: Create active directory accounts

Create active directory accounts which we are going to use for SQL Server 2008 installation and SharePoint 2010 installation.

1.       SQL Server Service Account (sqlSvcAcc)

2. SP Admin (SP Admin)

This account we will use for SharePoint 2010 Server installation. Make sure before installation, this user should be member of local admin group where we are installing SharePoint

Step 3: SQL Server 2008 R2 64 bit Installation

You can download SQL Server 2008 from https://www.dreamspark.com/ or

download a trial version from http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/get-sql-server/try-it.aspx

I am sharing with you video guide uploaded by howithink video channel. In this video they have explain how to install SQL 2008 R2 and prerequisites for Sharepoint 2010.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbh_0ndJ5Bk&feature=related

Step 4: Installation of SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition
You download trial version of SharePoint Server 2010 from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/ee388573

This video series part 2 by howithink video channel, In this video they have explained how to run SharePoint 2010 Server setup and create your first web application

Here is Screenshot of SharePoint Server Central Admin

This Screen shot is our first web application using team site template

Finally we have setup SharePoint 2010 Server Environment!. It took me four days to gather all this material and deploy environment. I hope you will appreciate my efforts and please don’t forget to comment or give any suggestions thanks very much!