Course Overview

Course Overview

Hi everyone. My name is Bill Kulterman and welcome to my course On Premises Installatoin of

SharePoint 2016. I am author here at Pluralsight and I've been working with SharePoint and creating
courses on it for many years. In this course, like the title says, we are going to learn how to perform an
on-prem installation of SharePoint 2016 with the new MinRole topology. The first step in using
SharePoint is learning how to get it up and running. In this course we'll do exactly that. We'll also learn
to get SQL Server installed and how to prepare it for use with SharePoint 2016. Some of the major topics
we will cover include SharePoint 2016 hardware, software, and topologies; installing the SharePoint
prerequisites, both online and offline; and creating the SharePoint farm using the wizard and, again,
with PowerShell. by the end of this course you'll have a working multi-tier SharePoint farm complete
with SQL Server up and running and ready to configure for your business needs. Before beginning the
course, you should be familiar with Windows Server, Active Directory, and PowerShell. I hope you'll join
me on this journey as we learn how to install SharePoint 2016 in an on-premises environment and
create a fully working multi-tier SharePoint MinRole farm.

Introduction

Introduction

Hi, welcome to Pluralsight. My name is Bill Kulterman and I want to welcome you to my course, On
Premises Installation of SharePoint 2016. This first module is meant to be an introduction. We're going
to talk briefly about what you can expect from this course, what kinds of things we're going to talk about
throughout the course, what we're going to do, and at the end of the day what you'll have. So let's go
ahead and let's get started. Our task is to, well like the title says, perform an On Premises installation of
SharePoint 2016. But there's a lot of things we have to do first before we get to that point. And we're
going to start by talking about SharePoint 2016 farm topologies. But before we even do that, we're
going to talk first about some of those legacy topologies. We're talking SharePoint 2007 and 2013. We'll
take a look a little bit at the standalone and multi-tier topologies. Then we'll get into the 2016
topologies, which of course involve MinRole. If you haven't heard that term, you're going to hear it a lot
in this course and we find out that SharePoint 2016 still has support for those legacy topologies that
we're used to. Then we're going to go ahead and take a look at the SharePoint 2016 requirements. We'll
start with hardware and we'll take a look at the Microsoft recommended hardware for the evaluation
and development deployment of SharePoint and a production deployment of SharePoint. Then we'll
take a look at software, our operating systems, which version of SQL Server we need, and any
prerequisite software required for SharePoint 2016. Then we're going to go ahead and install SQL Server
for SharePoint. Now I know you're saying, wait a minute, I thought this was a SharePoint course. Well it
is, but a very important part of SharePoint is SQL and if you've already installed SQL and you know how
to work with SQL for SharePoint, feel free to skip this lesson. But for those of you who may be new, this
is a really good introduction to SharePoint in getting SQL Server ready for our SharePoint installation.
We'll start by creating service accounts in Active Directory, and I know that's not SQL either, but it is a
necessary and important step. Then we'll go ahead and we'll do our installation of SQL, we'll work with
SQL Permissions, MAXDOP, which if you don't know what that means, we're going to get to that, we're
going to go into detail about that, and lastly how to deal with the Windows firewall and SQL. Our next
module we will get to install the SharePoint prerequisites, and basically this is pretty simple and there's
two ways to do it. There is an online installation using the prerequisite installer, which is part of the
SharePoint media. There is also an offline installation, which needs a little bit of PowerShell to make that
work. Again a lot of fun, very easy. And finally after all of that, we'll actually get around to installing our
SharePoint and creating our SharePoint farm. We'll kick off the SharePoint installation, which will result
in creating our SharePoint farm, using the Products Configuration Wizard, and it will also go ahead and
create the databases for us. Then we will go ahead and join the rest of our servers to the farm because
we are going to be creating essentially a multi-tier deployment of SharePoint. Now at this point we're
also going to go ahead and roll back a little bit from what we just did and we're now going to show you
how to create the farm using PowerShell. We'll create the databases, still use the Products Configuration
Wizard, and join our servers to the farm. There's a very specific reason why I'm going to go ahead and
show you both ways to do this, and we'll talk about that when we get to this module. And lastly, we're
going to go to Central Administration and take a look at managing our servers. We'll look at our server
status, we're going to upgrade a server and change a server role in our farm. There's a lot of great stuff
ahead, it's going to be a great course, I hope you enjoy it as much as I am enjoying making it for you. So
why don't we go ahead and let's get started.

SharePoint 2016 Farm Topologies

Overview

Hi welcome to Pluralsight. My name is Bill and this module is SharePoint 2016 Farm Topologies. In this
module we're going to start by taking a look at our tradition topologies. We'll take a quick look at how
we used to do things in 2007 through 2013, then we're going to go ahead and take a look at the new
topologies for 2016, and this, of course, involves MinRole. Now if you haven't heard the term MinRole
before, get used to it because it's here to stay, at least throughout this version of SharePoint. MinRole is
what we're using to describe the new SharePoint topology and the new way that we set up our farms.
And we're going to learn a lot about that throughout this entire course. So lots of good stuff to look
forward to. And we'll also see that we still have support for our legacy topologies, so we can still use
SharePoint the way we always have. We've got a lot of great things in store, so why don't we go ahead
and let's get started.

Traditional Topologies

With SharePoint versions 2007 through 2013 our topologies really didn't change very much, we pretty
much set things up the same way for all of these versions. Our standard topologies usually consisted of
either a standalone server or a multi-server, which was usually three different servers doing different
roles. Our standalone, we would have a SharePoint, which included the web server and the application
server parts, and SQL Express, which of course was our database server, all on one physical machine.
Now this deployment was good for evaluation, development, testing, but not for production. Some of
the reasons for that, of course, were it's not scalable, it has limited storage, only 10 GB for each
database, and there's no domain services. So you can see it was only good for those evaluation,
development, and testing purposes. Next we would often see a multi-server 2-tier deployment where
we would have all of our SharePoint bits on one machine and our SQL Server on another. Now this was
good in small environments, medium to small offices, not a lot of people using it, not a lot of high traffic,
and I will tell you quite honestly, if you've ever seen any my SharePoint 2013 or my SharePoint 2010
courses, this is the deployment I would have used. It was very simple, very easy, I was the only person
using the SharePoint server, so I didn't need a big, full, robust production environment. It was great for
my classroom environment, wonderful, wonderful way to go in small deployments. Then we would have
the standard multi-server 3-tier deployment where we would have our SharePoint split into a web
server, an application server, and then of course we would have our SQL, our database server. And you
could always add additional servers in those roles for high availability, for failover, whatever you
needed. This was pretty much the way we did things historically with older versions of SharePoint.

2016 Topologies

So what exactly is new in our 2016 topologies? What is different you might ask? Well before we go
there, let's talk about what's still the same, or at least similar. We still have the ability to use the
standalone deployment, although it is changed slightly, it's now called Single-Server, and we're going to
see all of this in much greater detail later in the course. One big change of our standalone deployment is
that SQL Express is no longer supported. You must now use a full blown SQL Server as your database
server. Also it's a little confusing because it is not really Single-Server anymore, it actually require two
machines. Now let me honest about this, technically you could still run this on one single machine, you
would still have to use a full SQL Server, you can't use SQL Express anymore, and all of your SharePoint
bits on one machine, but it is not recommended. You need to have one machine for SQL and one
machine for SharePoint, that is the Microsoft highly, highly, highly recommended way of using SQL
Server deployment. If you put it all on one machine, that better be a pretty, pretty hefty machine and
even with that, you're probably still likely to have some issues. We still have our multi-server
deployment, whether it's a 2-tier or a 3-tier, just like we had in our older versions of SharePoint. These
are good for small to medium deployments and they are now under what is called the custom server
role and we'll see a little bit more about that coming up. MinRole. So what exactly is MinRole? MinRole
is now what we refer to as our SharePoint topology. Everything, no matter how you're going to go
ahead, whatever topology you're going to use, whether it's standalone, legacy, or a full blown highly
recommended MinRole topology, it all falls under this category of MinRole. And what it does is it allows
you as the administrator to define each server's role in the farm. You get to specify those roles when
you're creating the farm and we're going to see this step by step in just a couple of modules from now.
SharePoint will configure those services accordingly and you will see that your farm performance is now
optimized. Let's talk a little bit more about this and break this down. The MinRole now has six server
roles. In the past we really had three, we had our web server, our application server, and our standalone
server. Now we have Front End, Application, Distributed Cache, Search, Custom, and Single-Server.
These are all roles that each server in your farm must fulfill. Every server, whether you're using legacy,
standalone, whatever it is, has to fall under one of these roles. Let's go through each of these in a little
bit more detail. Front-end. The front-end server role will house service applications and services that
handle user requests. And it's optimized for low latency. The application server role will handle service
applications and services for backend requests, background jobs. And it's optimized for high throughput.
The distributed service cache server role handles service applications and services around distributed
cache. Search, now search is an optional role, if you're planning to configure search and have a search
service, you need a separate server for it and the search server role will have service applications and
services having to do with search. Next we have the custom role. And that is anything that's not part of
the MinRole. So if you need to add any servers to your farm that are not under one of those other roles
that we just discussed, that needs to go under the custom role. The custom role is also where you're
going to go ahead and use those legacy deployments. So if you're going to run some of those old
architectures, that old deployments like we used to, all of the servers in your farm need to be assigned
the custom role. And it's really tempting to go ahead and just do this because it's going to mean you
don't need to buy more servers, you don't need more equipment because MinRole has now broken
things out into more servers, and that's fine, but the problem with that, there's a big downside, is you're
going to lose that assurance that you're running the farm at its peak, at its best optimization with all of
the services, and you're not going to get the best possible performance. The MinRole really with
SharePoint 2016 gives you the best, fastest, most efficient SharePoint we've ever had. So you want to
think about those things before you go ahead and continue to use those legacy deployments. And last
the single-server farm, which used to be our standalone, and once again it's not really single machine
deployment, two machines are recommended. One for your database, which has to be SQL not SQL
Express, and one for your SharePoint. So now your farm, your multi-server MinRole farm, will look like
this, one server for your front end one for application, one for distributed cache, one for search, perhaps
a custom role, and then of course any other servers that you add in those roles when they're configured
will need to be pointed to that role during the installation. So how does it work? What exactly is the
MinRole doing? What makes it so spectacular? Why is it the new thing? What is Microsoft up to?
Remember SharePoint is basically a core set of services and instances that I require to run on specific
servers that are assigned to those specific roles. In the past it wasn't always easy to determine what
services needed to run on which role and how many servers you needed, it was a little bit tricky. Now it
got easier over the years and there certainly was enough documentation and a lot of people there
figuring it out and, you know, trying to help you, but it wasn't always clear what needed to go where.
The benefits of the MinRole are that when you create a new farm or if you add a server to an existing
farm, SharePoint will assign those services to the proper server based on its role. When we install the
servers, when we go and we stand up these servers and we install SharePoint on each one of them,
you're going to see it's going to ask us right from the onset, what role of those six roles that I showed
you, what role is this server going to play? SharePoint is then going to go ahead and add those server
instances and services to that server. It will also figure out what other services you have enabled in the
farm and start those as well. And whenever you create a new service application or disable or get rid of
one, MinRole was going to go ahead and start or stop the application service instances. The same thing
goes when you enable or disable services as well. The MinRole is very smart. It's going to help you with
better performance and optimize your farm. You can also, as you start to look at this and think about it,
you probably are also realizing this is going to make capacity planning a lot easier as well. The new
MinRole is going to be really cool, it's going to be a great way to work with SharePoint from now on, and
we're going to have a lot of fun setting this up and if you still have questions about this, it's all going to
become clearer when we actually get to the installation just a few modules from now.

Summary

Now it's time to review what we talked about. We started by looking at traditional topologies. We saw
the standalone, which had all of our SharePoint bits and our database, in this case it would have been
SQL Express, all on one machine. It was appropriate for evaluation, testing, development environments,
but nothing else. And then we had multi-server topologies, whether it's a 2-tier or a 3-tier where we
would break up our SharePoint into a web server and an application server and then of course a
database server. Then we took a look at the 2016 MinRole topologies and we saw there were 6, the
front-end server role, the application server role, the distributed cache server role, and the optional
search server role. Then we have the custom role, which was any other role, something that was not
one of the other four, any servers that needed to have different functions than those. And we also saw
that you would use the custom role for any of those legacy deployments. Remember if we wanted to do
a traditional architecture for our farm, all of the servers in that deployment would need to be assigned
to the custom role when installing SharePoint 2016. We saw the single server role, which replaced the
standalone, and of course the big change there was no support for SQL Express, you have to go ahead
and use the full version of SQL, and you know, despite what the name says, it's not really a single server,
it is highly, highly, highly recommended that for the single server role you use two machines, one for
SQL and one for SharePoint. And of course the benefits to using the MinRole, performance
enhancements and better capacity planning. In our next module we're going to go ahead and we will
look at the software and hardware requirements for SharePoint 2016. That's it for this lesson gang,
thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.

SharePoint 2016 Requirements

Overview

Hi welcome to Pluralsight. My name is Bill and this module is SharePoint 2016 Requirements. Let's go
ahead and let's take a look at what we're going to talk about throughout this module. We'll start by
going over the hardware requirements for an evaluation/development deployment. In this most likely
we're talking about our single server role or a small legacy 2-tier deployment, again, evaluation,
development, and testing. Then we'll take a look at the production requirements, which of course will
be for all of our servers under the MinRole deployment, and remember these are all the minimum
requirements as set forth by Microsoft. We all know that sometimes the minimum might not be enough,
depending on how truly big our deployment is. Next we'll look at the software requirements. We'll start
by looking at which operating systems you can run SharePoint on, then we'll take a look at the needs for
the SQL Server and all of the prerequisite software. So a lot of great stuff in store, why don't we go
ahead and let's get started.

Hardware Requirements

Alright let's go ahead now and let's take a look at the hardware requirements for our development or
evaluation installation with the minimum recommended services running. This is going to be our farm
with two computers, our database, our SQL Server, and our SharePoint server. For our SQL Server, RAM
- we require 16 GB, processor should be 64 bits with 4 cores, hard disk space - an 80 GB system drive
with 100 GB second drive. In this deployment our SharePoint single-server role requires 12 GB of RAM,
our processor should be 64-bit with 4 cores, hard disk - minimum 80 GB system drive and 80 GB second
drive. Now let's take a look at the requirements in a production environment. This is an environment
where we would have all services running. In other words, our four or five server farm using all of our
MinRoles server roles. SQL Server should have 24 GB of RAM, the process, once again, 64-bit with 4
cores, hard disk space - 80 GB system drive and 100 GB for all additional drives. For our web or
application server, which of course is all of the other server roles in our MinRole topology, RAM needs to
be a minimum of 16 GB, processor once again 64-bit with 4 cores, hard disk - an 80 GB system drive and
80 GB for all additional drives. Now remember, these requirements are for every single machine in your
farm. Now I want you to remember that these requirements that we're laying out here in this module
are the minimums as recommended by Microsoft. Chances are if your deployment is very large or you
have a lot of people working with your SharePoint, you're going to need a lot more RAM, you're going to
need a lot more processing power, you're going to need a lot more hard disk space. These are the
minimums. Planning and designing your SharePoint architecture is a huge undertaking and something
that needs to be done seriously before you even begin to start thinking about installation. But it's also
something that's outside of the scope of this course, but have no fear, right now while I'm recording this
course, one of my colleagues is creating a course on planning and designing your SharePoint
architecture for 2016. My goal in these first two lessons is just to simply give you a high level overview
of the basic topologies for SharePoint and your basic minimum requirements for your servers. So when
you're getting ready to go ahead and plan and design your SharePoint architecture, make sure you check
back in the library for that course on that subject, okay? Alright, now let's go ahead and let's take a look
at software requirements.

Software Requirements

Alright let's go ahead now and let's talk about the software requirements for SharePoint 2016. We'll
start with the operating system for all of our servers. You can use the 64-bit Windows Server 2012 R2,
either the standard or Datacenter edition, or you will also be able to use the 64-bit Windows Server
2016. Now at the time of this recording, Windows Server 2016 is in technical preview, it is not out for
general release, so we will be using in this course the Windows Server 2012 R2. Next we'll take a look at
SQL Server, we can use either the 64-bit SQL Server 2014 with service pack 1 or you can use the 64-bit
SQL Server 2016, which I am happy to announce that at the time of this recording that was just released
about 6 days ago, so very exciting, it is RTM now. And remember that SQL Express is no longer
supported by SharePoint 2016. And I want to have a little bit of an aside here, now if you plan to use any
of the BI capabilities of SharePoint 2016, you are going to need 64-bit SQL Server 2016. The 2014 service
pack 1 will not give you all of the BI options that you want, so keep that in mind when you're trying to
decide which version of SQL Server you're going to use. Next let's take a look at the prerequisite
software and it's quite a list, let me tell you. We'll start with the Web Server IIS role, the Application
Server Role, the Microsoft.NET Framework version 4.6, this is the newest, Microsoft SQL Server 2012
Service Pack 1 Native Client, Microsoft WCF Data Services 5.6, Microsoft Information Protection and
Control Client, Microsoft Sync Framework Runtime version 1.0, service pack 1, 64-bit, Windows Server
AppFabric 1.1, Cumulative Update Package 7 for Microsoft AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server knowledge
base 3092423, Microsoft ODBC Driver 11 for SQL Server, Visual C++ Redistributable Package for Visual
Studio 2012, and Visual C++ Redistributable Package for Visual Studio 2015. That's a pretty hefty list, but
you don't have to worry about it because they will all be installed in the proper order by the prerequisite
installer and we're going to go through this step by step, I believe 2 modules from now. It's a lot easier.
Let's all thank Microsoft for the prerequisite installer because just imagine trying to track down all of
those little bits of software and trying to figure out what exact order am I supposed to install these in?
We don't have to do it, the prerequisite installer is going to take care of all of that for us. And of course,
as time goes on, now this is the list right now, as time goes on, that list is likely to change, but again the
prerequisite installer will always handle all of those requirements, okay.

Summary

Now it's time to review what we talked about. We started by looking at the hardware requirements for
our SharePoint servers. We looked at how much RAM we were going to need, how much processing
power, hard disk space, and the different requirements for an evaluation/development environment or
a production environment, and remember, these were all the minimum requirements according to
Microsoft. Then we took a look at the software requirements for our machines. We looked at the
operating system and we saw that it was Windows Server 2012 R2 or when it comes available, Windows
Server 2016, because remember at the time of this recording 2016 is still in technical preview, so for our
course we will be using 2012 R2. Then we looked at the software requirements for our SQL Server and
we saw that we were able to use either SQL Server 2014 with Service Pack 1 or SQL Server 2016, which
has just come out, and remember that SQL Server 2016 is necessary if you want to use the BI capabilities
of SharePoint. And one more time, just as a reminder, SQL Express is no longer supported. And lastly,
the software requirements regarding the prerequisite software, and remember that was a pretty big list,
but that is all handled by the prerequisite installer, so we don't have to worry about that at all, and we'll
see this in just a couple modules from now. Okay in our next module we're going to go ahead and we
are going to prepare our SQL Server for us with SharePoint. We'll install an instance of SQL Server, get it
all up and running, get it ready, do all the little tweaks and things that we need to do, and then when we
further down the road install SharePoint, SharePoint will be able to go ahead, connect to our SQL Server
and start to create those databases for us. So make sure you don't miss that lesson, but that's it for this
lesson. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.

Installing SQL Server for SharePoint

Overview

Hi welcome to Pluralsight. My name is Bill and this module is SQL Server Installation for SharePoint. In
this module we're going to start by talking about service accounts. The first thing we need to do is create
some service accounts for our installation. So we're going to start by taking a look at what service
accounts are needed and what service accounts are. Then we're going to go ahead and move to the
demo, we're actually going to configure those service accounts in Active Directory. Then we're going to
get to installing SQL. It's pretty simple straightforward demo, we'll get SQL all up and running and then
there's going to be a few post installation activities that we're going to have to do. We're going to have
to deal with MAXDOP and we'll talk about that when we get there. We're going to have to set up some
SQL permissions and we're going to have to do a little fancy work with our Windows firewall. So lots of
great stuff in store, why don't we go ahead and let's get started.

Service Accounts

So what exactly is a service account? Well it's very, very simple. A service account provides a security
context for services running on SharePoint. That's basically it. We're going to need, and this will be a
little bit clearer as we go ahead and create them and when we actually start installing, you'll see which
service accounts, what they do, and why we need them. We have to create service accounts and we
have to give them permissions to do certain things on our server. Now in this lesson what we're going to
have to do is give our SharePoint account permission to access SQL so that it can write the SQL
databases. Now we're going to go ahead and create these service accounts with the concept of
something called least privilege. Least privilege is the idea of assigning only what is needed for the
account to function. In other words, don't give a service account full administrator permissions to do
everything that it could possibly do when all it needs is maybe it just needs a read privilege or a simple
read/write privilege. You give the account the least amount of privileges that it needs to function,
alright. That's best practice when you're dealing with these service accounts. Now in this module we are
going to go ahead and we are going to create three main accounts. Our SQL Server Service Account, our
SharePoint Setup User Account, and Server Farm/Database Access Account. And we'll talk all about that
just a little bit more. We'll get into a little more about those. Now when you're working with SharePoint,
you're going to need a lot of different service accounts, and how many accounts you need and what you
need them for, it varies, it all depends and if you've ever watched any of my older courses you know
that that's the answer to a lot of SharePoint questions. The answer is it depends, it depends on what
you're trying to do and the size of your SharePoint installation, you know, the scope, what exactly you're
trying to do, how many service accounts that you need and for what purpose all depends on what you're
doing. But for our purposes today, for this module, all we need are those three accounts. Now there are
many more service accounts that you're going to need with SharePoint. Things like Application Pool
Identity accounts, Service Application accounts, you can have a separate service account for Search or
User Profile Services, and many, many others. Like I said, it all depends on what you're trying to do with
SharePoint and as needed, as you go throughout our SharePoint courses, you'll be given more
information about what service accounts you need. Alright let's go ahead now and let's stop talking
about service accounts, let's go ahead and create a few (Loading).

Configure Service Accounts in Active Directory

Alright so we are here now on our domain controller and we need to start to create those service
accounts. So we're going to go to our Active Directory Users and Computers, and there's our domain,
globomantics.com and you see we already have an OU for our users, that's our administrators, all of the
default users that come with Windows Server. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a
separate OU just for my SharePoint users and administrators. I like to do that when I'm creating a
course, it's very simple, very easy to keep track of where everybody is. Now your company might have
specific procedures as to, you know, how to create groups and OUs, security groups, whatever it is, you
know, there's no right or wrong, this is just the way I'm doing it for my course. You could put them all
here in the regular users group, whatever you want, whatever you're more comfortable with. We're
going to go up here to our domain, right click and choose New, Organizational Unit, and I'm going to call
it SP Users, so it's very clear, and there we go. Now we're going to add, like I told you, three user
accounts. So we'll go to Action, New, User and the first one we're going to do is our SQL account, the
SQL user account. We're going to call this SPSQL, this will be our SharePoint SQL account. We'll give it
the login and now you may be noticing I'm using all caps, again, you can have them all caps, all small, a
combination of both, you can't have spaces but a lot of people would have SP_SQL. Again, no right or
wrong, it's whatever your comfortable with. I like to use the all caps for these administrator accounts
because when I'm looking down a big list of them they pop out because they're all caps. It makes it really
easy to find it. Alright go to Next, Password, I'm going to put in our super secret password (Typing), and
because I'm the only one using this and there's no secure information and I'm not worried about
anything happening to it, I'm going to put it to password never expires. Don't do that in production okay.
Choose Next and Finish. And there's our SPSQL service account. Now I'm going to go ahead and do
another one. This one is going to be our SPINSTALL account. Now we're going to use this when we get to
actually installing SharePoint, this is going to be our install account as it suggests by the name,
SharePoint Install. This is what we're going to use for all of the installation of our SharePoint
components. And again, I like to have it all in caps and again my super secret password (Typing), and this
one also password never expires. Alright now we have one left and this is going to be our farm account.
This is going to be our SharePoint farm account. So you might already have guessed because I'm using a
very consistent naming convention here, SPFARM. I like the names of my service accounts to be very
obvious so everybody says where's the farm account? Oh there it is, SPFARM, that must be the
SharePoint farm account. So there you go. Now if you're not familiar with Active Directory, you've never
done this before, this is as you can see, pretty straightforward, pretty simple. If you are trying to do this
to a live environment and you don't have access to your Active Directory, you're not the administrator,
you know, just tell the guy you need three new service accounts and what they're for and they should
be able to help you out, alright. And there we go, there are our service accounts. Now that was pretty
simple, wasn't it? Alright so let's go ahead now and let's install SQL.

Basic Installation of SQL Server

Alright so here we are on our SQL Server, well can we really call it the SQL Server if we haven't' installed
SQL yet? Well that is a question I'm going to leave to the philosophers, but we're going to settle that
because we're going to install SQL right now, that's what we're about to do. So we're going to go to our
explorer here, I've already mounted the ISO so let's get it open and kick this off by double clicking on
setup. And we'll have to give this a minute for the computer to think about what it's doing, there we go,
we can close that now. And there we are. Our SQL Server Installation Center for our Microsoft SQL
Server 2016, and this is the Enterprise edition. Now here on the left we have a lot of options, Planning,
Installation, Maintenance, Tools, Resources, Advanced, and Options. The one we want, you can probably
guess, is Installation. And the very first thing we want is the top of the list, New SQL Server stand-alone
installation or add features to an existing installation. Well we don't have an existing installation, so that
looks like the one we want. We'll click there, we can close that back up. Now remember you can have
more than one instance of SQL on a computer, but we only need one, and there are no existing ones on
this machine, so we're all set. Our product key is already there so we're going to go ahead and click Next
and I will accept the license terms because if I don't we're not going to get very far, click on Next. Now
it's doing a rule check and that was very fast, and we'll get back to that in just a second, it's going to
come back. Now it's saying, do we want to check for updates? And as you can see it is recommended, so
I am going to check there. It's always a good idea to go ahead and let this look for updates. We're going
to click Next and it's going to go through and connect to Microsoft and see if there are any updates
available. Now this version of SQL 2016 is brand new, it just came out about 2 weeks ago and I'm not
surprised there were no updates. But if there were updates we would have gone ahead and let it install
them for us. Now it's done with the rule check and we see that we have green checkmarks all the way
down until we get to the very last one which is our Windows firewall, we have a little yellow triangle
there with an exclamation point and if we go over to the right of that, you'll see it says warning. Okay,
let's go ahead and let's view the detailed report. When it does that rule check, these are all of the things
that it checks for and you'll notice that, if you notice here in the Results column, they're either not
applicable or they all passed with one exception and that is the question is the firewall enabled? We got
the warning because the Windows firewall is enabled, make sure that the appropriate parts are open to
enable remove access. Okay, obviously it's a very good idea to have Windows firewall enabled, if you
don't you might want to speak to somebody about that. And this is telling us we have to open up a port.
Now we're going to do that later because this is simply a warning, it's not going to prevent us from
installing SQL Server. So we're going to leave this alone for right now, but we're going to come back at
the end of this module and take care of that Windows firewall. We're going to put an exception through
our firewall, so that we can connect or actually so that our SharePoint Server can connect to the SQL
Server. So let's go ahead, everything else is just fine, we'll click Next. Now if we had problems with any
of these other rule checks, you would have to go ahead and fix those and you can get more information
on those by clicking on that report and hopefully it's nothing too serious that you'll have to worry about.
Alright let's go ahead and click Next. And now we go to our feature selection, this is where we have to
select what parts of SQL Server we want, what features we need. Well we need, the very first one that
we see here, the Database Engine Services, because of course we're using this to create our SharePoint
databases. Now if you take a look over here on the right in our feature description, down here in the
middle it says Prerequisites for selected features and if we scroll up and down, we see that already
installed has been Windows PowerShell and Microsoft.NET framework 4.6, but to be installed from the
media, from our ISO is the Windows Visual Studio 2010 Redistributables. So we know that that's not
there, but it knows it needs it and it knows it's there on the ISO and it can go ahead and install it. Now
we're going to scroll down here because there is something else that we need and if you've ever dealt
with SQL 2014 or 2012 or older ones, if you've ever done this before with SharePoint, you know that we
need our management tools, and as we scroll on down here, they're not there, we don't see them. And
you're saying to yourself, hey Bill, wait a minute, I know we need the management tools, where are
they? Well don't panic because this is something that has changed in SQL 2016. They have separated out
the management tools, it is now a separate installation. So we're going to go ahead and continue on the
way we're going here right now and we will add the management tools later, we'll go ahead and install
them, and they're on the installation media, they're on our ISO, or you could go ahead and go right to
Microsoft and download them and install them. Now we take a look down here, where do we want to
install SQL Server? Do we want to leave it in the default? I do, I'm perfectly fine with that, but if you
need to move it somewhere else you click on one of these buttons over here and it allows you to select
where you want to install it to. So we're good on this page, we're going to click Next. And there we go.
We see that we have the default instance to MSSQLSERVER. That's because we don't have any other
versions of SQL on here. We have no more instances on here. If we had another one, we would have to
go ahead and rename it, we would have to give this new instance a different name, but we don't have to
because this is the only one we have, but if we're going to add more we're going to have to give it
another name. So this is fine. We're going to go ahead and click Next. And it's making us wait again.
Alright now we need to go ahead and add in our service accounts, those accounts that we created in the
last clip. We're going to go here and for our SQL Server agent, the default is, as you can see, NT
Service/SQLSERVER, yeah we don't want that. We're going to go ahead and we are going to browse
because this is where we're going to add our SPSQL, so we'll put globomantics\spsql, check for that
name, and there it is, and click OK. Then we need to go over here and add in a password for that
account. And we're going to leave these startups just the way they were. Now we need to do the same
thing for the SQL Server Database Engine (Typing), select the same account, our SPSQL account, and add
(Typing) the password. Now we can't do anything about the SQL Server browser, and that's just fine, we
are good to go on this page. Let's go ahead and select Next (Loading). Now this is, what do we want to
use for our database engine configuration? What do we want for our authentication mode? Do we want
Windows authentication or do we want a mixed mode? Well this again is entirely up to you and the
procedures and policies that you have in place in your organization. For us we're going to leave it on the
Windows authentication mode because it's a lot easier to deal with, but specify SQL Server
administrators, we are going to add our current user, which is our globomantics administrator, and I'm
going to also add (Typing) my SPINSTALL, giving both of those administrative rights to SQL Server. Alright
looking pretty good. Let's go ahead and select Next. We want to make sure we add that SPINSTALL
account because we're using that to install SharePoint, it's going to need to reach out to SQL Server to
create those databases and we need to make sure that that's added. Alright we're ready to install. This is
a list of everything that it's going to install for us. You'll see that already installed we have Windows
PowerShell and Microsoft.NET framework, which we already talked about, and everything else looks
pretty good. Let's go ahead and let's kick off this install. And now we wait. And this is going to take a
little bit of time, so I'm not going to make you sit here and watch while this goes on. I'm going to take a
pause in the recording, and this is probably a good time for you to go and get a cup of coffee, maybe
have some lunch, because this'll take awhile. I just like to wait before I shut this off for us to start seeing
the green line, the little status going across the screen, it makes me feel better, makes me think yeah
this is actually happening. So there we go. Alright I'll be back in a little while. Alright and we're back, and
you can see that our SQL Server 2016 installation completed successfully with product updates, and if
we go down that list we see everything green checks all the way, we are successful. SQL is up and
running and installed on this machine. Alright the next thing we're going to do is go back and install
those management tools.

Install SQL Management Studio

Alright now we need to go ahead and once again kick off our installation media. We're going to go to
Setup, Installation, and we notice that the second option on this list now is Install SQL Server
Management Tools, that's what we need. So we're simply going to click on there and you'll notice that
it's going to take us right to Microsoft and we're going to download, Save that, and we'll let it go. And I
will return when it's done. Alright that download has concluded, we can go ahead, we can close up
Internet Explorer, and just click on Run. And we see we get the screen for Microsoft SQL Server
Management Studio, click to Install, and once again we'll have to wait while it does it's thing and I'll be
right back. Alright I want to go ahead and interrupt our downloading here for a just a second so you can
see this screen. You'll see it's showing us our overall progress and which packages are being installed,
and as you can probably tell, it's still going to take a little time, so we'll pause and come right back when
it's done. Alright and we're back, and as you can see our setup has completed. So we'll simply go ahead
and click on Close, we can close that up. Alright let's go ahead now and let's pin that Management
Studio to our Start menu and actually let's do the Installation Center too and our Configuration
Manager. Great. Now we'll click on our Management Tools, Management Studio here is starting to open
up, and well the fact that it has the server name there is a good sign, we'll connect. And there we go,
look at that, pretty cool. Okay, now we need to go ahead and go back and finish off a few of those tasks
that we had left for the end. So let's close this up and go ahead and do that now.

Max Degree of Parallelism

Alright now it's time for us to talk about max degree of parallelism or MAXDOP. I know that's a mouthful
and if you've never heard of it, don't panic, I'm going to get you through it, that's why I'm here. With SQL
Server we have the ability in systems that contain more than one CPU to use all available processors, all
of our cores for each of our queries in SQL Server. Now that sounds great, doesn't it? To make this
happen, and it's set like this by default, the default value is set to 0, and don't worry we'll show you
where this is, we have to go in there, so don't worry about where this value is set right now. To make
this happen, to use the max degree of parallelism, that's what this is called, using all of the available
processors, up to 64, you could use 64 cores for every SQL query, and it's set to do this by default, that is
our max degree of parallelism. We also have the ability with SQL to tell it how many processors we want
it to use. In fact, we can set the value from 1 to 32,767. Now I'll be honest with you, I don't know why
it's that number, why it's that high because we only have 64 cores, there's some sort of magic formula in
there that somebody knows, but for our purposes it doesn't really matter. We can set how many
processors we use for every single query execution. Now remember by default it's 0, by default it's going
to use all of our available processors. SharePoint doesn't like this, that is not going to work with
SharePoint. With SharePoint we have to suppress the max degree of parallelism and we do that by
changing the value to 1. I cannot stress enough how important this is. This has to happen, we have to
change that value from the default 0 to 1. Alright. So let's go ahead and let's see how that's done. Alright
we're back here on our SQL Server and it really is a SQL Server now, and we need to go ahead and open
up our Management Studio and connect to our database engine. Alright, now up here in the left, in this
left column in our Object Explorer, the very top, top item on the list, SQL1, that's our SQL Server, we
need to right click there and go all the way down this list to the bottom to Properties. So let's click there.
And on our server properties, down here near the bottom of select a page, we're going to choose
Advanced. We have a lot of stuff going on here, we're going to scroll all the way down to the bottom
and you'll see parallelism and right there, the max degree of parallelism, and you'll notice that the
default value is 0, so we need to change that to what? What did I tell you? We've got to change it to 1.
So we'll double click in there to highlight that 0, we're going to change it to 1, and select OK. And let's, I
always like to, call me paranoid, but I always like to double check to make sure that stayed, there we go,
and we're good. And that's it, it's that simple, but it's very important. Alright the next thing we're going
to do is, remember when we were installing we had that warning about the Windows firewall? Now
we're to go ahead and we are going to open a port through our firewall for SQL Server.

Configure the Windows Firewall

Alright now we need to go ahead and open up a TCP port on our SQL Server through our firewall, and to
do that we simply need to create an inbound rule in our firewall. So let's go ahead and let's open up our
firewall. And you see over here in the upper left, Inbound Rules, that's what we need, we'll click on that,
and then over here on the right near the top we will choose New Rule. And like I said, it is Port, we are
going to open up a port so we will click on Port for what type of rule you would like to create, click on
Next. It is TCP and we have to specify which port. And for SQL it is 1433. Now if we were doing this over
SSL, it would be 433, but we're not, so we're going to choose Next. And what do we want to do? Do we
want to allow the connection? Yes that's exactly what we want, we'll choose Next, and when does this
apply? This is fine, we'll choose Next. We need to give it a name (Typing) and a description, and Finish,
and there's our rule right up there at the top of the Inbound Rules list. And we're good to go, we're
done. That is all we needed to do, and if we had done this first before our installation with SQL when we
ran through the rule check, we would not have gotten that Windows firewall warning. So everything is
good as far as this goes. The next thing, and actually it is the last thing we're going to do in this lesson,
and that is to create our SQL permissions.

Set up SQL Permissions

Alright so what we have to do now is, remember when we created that SPINSTALL account, and that's
the account we're going to use when we go ahead and actually start installing SharePoint on our
SharePoint servers, and we need to go ahead and make that account part of the local administrators
group on our SQL Server. So the first thing we're going to do is get to our edit local users and groups,
we'll go ahead and choose Groups, Administrators, and Add (Typing) that SPINSTALL account. Okay,
that's going to give that SharePoint install account permission to do things on our SQL Server. Now we
also need to go ahead and make sure that that account has a login to SQL Server and that it has the
permission to create those databases. So we need to open up our Management Studio again, connect to
our database, and we're going to go to the Security section and look at Logins and let me make this a
little bit bigger. We need to look down the list and there it is, there is our GLOBOMANTICS\SPINSTALL,
so we know it already has a login, if it did not you would select Logins and right click and you could
choose New Login like that, and add that account that way, but it already has that login, so what we're
going to do is double click on it and we're going to go to Server Roles and we need to make sure that it
has dbcreator and securityadmin. Now that SPINSTALL account has all of the permissions that it needs
for the installation of SharePoint and the creation of those databases. And that's all we need to do, now
our SQL Server is ready to go. Our next lesson, we're going to go and start to install SharePoint on our
SharePoint servers. But before we do that, let's have a summary of what we talked about in this lesson.

Summary

Alright now it's time for us to review what we talked about. We started with a discussion about service
accounts, what they are, what their purpose was, and that we set them up using a concept called least
privilege, and basically this means giving those accounts the least amount of permission that they need
to do their job. Then we went ahead and in Active Directory created those service accounts. We created
our SPSQL account, our SPINSTALL account, and our SPFARM account. Next we went ahead and actually
installed SQL. We went through the rule check, we had one warning there for the firewall, but we saw
that there were no updates needed, but if there were we wanted to go ahead and make sure that we
got them. And from our features we selected the Database Engine Services and although we knew that
we needed the Management Studio, we saw that unlike previous versions of SQL, it wasn't there for us
to select at this time, we had to do that as a separate download, and that was what we did next. We
installed those Management Tools, and we did it from the setup media, the installation media, but it just
took us to that website, to that Microsoft site where that Management studio was for us to download
and install. Then after our SQL installation as done, we went ahead and we talked about MAXDOP, that
max degree of parallelism. Remember we need to change that value from the default 0 to 1. Then we
went ahead and took care of that exception that we had with our Windows firewall. Remember we had
to open that inbound port 1433 so that SharePoint would have access to our SQL Server. Then the last
thing that we did was set up our SQL permissions. We added the SPINSTALL account to our
administrators group on our local machine, then we checked for a SQL login for that SPINSTALL account
and added those server roles that it needed and that was for us the dbcreator and securityadmin. Now
in our next lesson we're going to go ahead and actually go about installing our SharePoint server. But
that's it for this lesson, thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.

Installing the SharePoint 2016 Prerequisites

Overview

Hi welcome to Pluralsight. My name is Bill and this module is Installing the SharePoint 2016
Prerequisites. Now this is going to be a fun module. We are going to, as the title says, install the
prerequisites for SharePoint 2016 on our servers. Now we're only going to put it on two, you don't have
to sit there and watch me do it on every single one of them, but there are two ways to go about this.
One is online, so the server that we're going to install this on will be on the internet with the
Prerequisite Installer. We'll use the Prerequisite Installer that comes on our SharePoint media, it will
connect with Microsoft and download all of the files that we need and do the installation for us, it's
pretty quick and easy, and in fact, if this was the only way to do this, this module would be about 3
minutes long. But we are also going to then do an offline installation of our prerequisites using the
Prerequisite Installer. Now you're probably saying, wait a minute Bill, we're going to do it the same way?
Not quite. We are going to still use the Prerequisite Installer, but we are going to have to gather the files
first that we need and then we're going to use a little bit of PowerShell to help us install them all. It's
going to be a lot of fun, you learn a lot of great things in this module, so why don't we go ahead and let's
get started.

Using the Prerequisite Installer

Alright here we are on our front end server, on our SharePoint server that will handle the frontend
duties and we're ready to install our prerequisites. Now first I want you to take a look down here in the
lower right corner and you'll notice that the network icon is clear, there's no warning triangle, there's no
circle with an x, we are online, we're on the internet with this computer, which is good because with this
installation, the Prerequisite Installer is going to reach out to Microsoft and download all of the files that
we need and install them for us. The other thing that I want you to see is take a look up here in the
upper right, you'll see that I am logged into this computer with my SPINSTALL account. The SPINSTALL
account, you'll remember, is an account that we created, remember we created that, we put that in
Active Directory, it is one of our users, and we created that account specifically with the intention of
using it for all of the SharePoint installation that we're doing. This SPINSTALL account is also a local
administrator on this machine. Okay. So we're ready to go, we have to use that install account, you
really, I cannot stress that enough, you really, really, really want to use your install account for this. So
now let's go ahead and let's take a look, I've already mounted the SharePoint ISO, the SharePoint 2016
ISO, it's here in drive E. Let's open it up and take a look. Now you will see here, prerequisiteinstaller, and
quite honestly I could just click on this and kick this off, but what I want to do is go down to the splash
screen because I like to show that to everybody, we'll go ahead and we'll double click on the splash
screen. I can close that, and you'll see, there it is, SharePoint 2016, that's what it looks like. And when
we take a look here, we see under Install, install the software prerequisites. That sounds like exactly
what we're trying to do, so let's just click there and there is the list of the prerequisites that this thing is
going to go ahead and install. We'll click Next. We will accept the terms of the license agreement
because if we don't, we're not going to get very far. Choose OK. And there you go, it's started. That's it.
The process is underway. We don't have to do anything else, at least for a few minutes. Now this is
going to take awhile to go ahead and finish this process and you don't have to sit here and watch it. I do,
but I'm going to pause the recording and I'll come back. Now we're going to need a restart and it's going
to continue to go ahead and download and install some more of these prerequisites. We're going to
have at least one restart, so I'll come back when we're ready for that and show you what to do, okay? In
the meantime, I'll see you in a few minutes. Alright and I'm back and you'll see our system needs to
restart to continue, so we're not finished installing everything, but we do need a restart. So we're going
to go ahead and do that. Alright we're back from our restart and it looks like we have a problem, doesn't
it? We have a little warning box here that says E:\prerequisiteinstaller.exe, the system cannot find the
drive specified. Now think about this for a minute, remember we have the ISO image for SharePoint
2016 and we mounted it in drive E, but when we restarted the computer, of course it wasn't remounted.
So that's the only problem here. It's not a big deal. Now if you had a disk, if you had your SharePoint
media on a disk and the disk was in the disk drive, you wouldn't get this message. But it's not a big deal
for us. We're going to go ahead and click OK. We've going to go back here and we're going to mount that
ISO again and really all I need to do is kick off the Prerequisite Installer and click Next, we'll accept the
license term again, and it's simply going to go and finish the rest of the installation for us. And this part is
very, very fast so it won't take me very long to be back and I'll be back when it's done. Wow, I didn't
even have a chance to pause the recording and the installation was complete. I told you, it didn't take
very long so we're done, and it's that easy to go ahead and install the prerequisites with the Prerequisite
Installer and if your machine is online. Now if it's not, it's going to be a little more involved and that's
going to be the subject of our next clip.

Offline Installation of the Prerequisites

Alright now it's time for us to talk a little bit about the offline installation. We saw how easy the online
installation was, it was so simple, it did all the work for us. Now the offline installation isn't quite so
easy, we're going to have to do a little bit more work, but still it's not bad. The first thing we need to do
is find that prerequisiteinstaller.exe file and it's very simple to find, it's on our SharePoint disk. But we
also have to go and find an accompanying DLL file that has to go along with that Prerequisite Installer,
and I'll show you where that is and which one it is and what to do with it. Next we have to gather all of
the rest of the necessary files. When we did the online installation, SharePoint reached out to Microsoft
and got all of the files that it needed, it downloaded them all and installed them, but because we're
offline, we need to gather up those files ourselves. I'll show you how to find exactly which files you need
and then you're probably saying, where do we have to put all of these once we've got them, what do we
do to them, where do they go? And we'll work with that. Then we have to install the server roles. There
are some additional server roles that we need to install on this server before we can go ahead and install
the prerequisites, and that's a fairly simple process too. All we're going to need is our server media, the
disk for Windows Server, in our case Windows Server 2012 R2, or the ISO, depending on what you have.
Then we have to run a little script and it'll install that very quickly, very easily. That's a really, really easy
step. Then we're going to run that Prerequisite Installer. Once everything is gathered up we have a
PowerShell script that'll run that installer, install all of the files that we just downloaded for us, and our
server will be up and ready to go and get SharePoint installed on it. Alright but enough talking about it,
let's go ahead and let's do this.

Prerequisiteinstaller.exe

Alright the file prerequisiteinstaller.exe lives on the SharePoint 2016 media, whether it's a disk or an ISO,
it lives there along with its companion Vcruntime140.dll. These two files are what we're looking for. We
need both of these and once we have them, you're probably asking yourself, where do the files belong?
Well, what we need to do is create a folder on the root of our C drive. I named my folder
SharePoint2016 because I don't want there to be any confusion about what's in that folder. You can call
it whatever you want, you can call it Bob, as long as you know where it is and you remember what it's
called because the paths are going to be very important later on when we start dealing with the script.
Then we're going to take that SharePoint Prerequisiteinstaller.exe file and its accompanying DLL file, and
we're going to put them in that folder at the root of our C drive. Let's go ahead and let's do that now.
Alright now we're on our application server and this is the machine we're going to use to do that offline
installation. If you go ahead and take a look in the lower right corner, you'll see our little network icon
and there's a red circle with a white x in it, that lets us know that we have no internet connection on this
machine. So we know that the Prerequisite Installer will not be able to go out to Microsoft and
download those files that we need. We're going to have to gather those up ourselves, and we'll do that
in just a little while. Next I want to go ahead and show you that I am logged into this machine with the
SPINSTALL account, just like we were on the frontend server, and just like on the frontend server, that
SPINSTALL account is part of the local administrators group on this machine. That's very important, that
is necessary for us to continue to do this. And just as a reminder, whenever we go and install any
SharePoint components on any of our SharePoint servers, we want to be using that SPINSTALL account.
Alright let's go ahead now and let's find the Prerequisite Installer. I'm going to open up our Windows
Explorer and, now I have an ISO, as I told you before, so I'm going to go, I have a folder called ISO, and
I'm going to mount the SharePoint ISO, and as I look through the files I find there it is, the Prerequisite
Installer. Now we can't just leave this here and run it off of this, we need to, like I said, put it in another
folder, we have to put it somewhere, we've got to know where it is, it's going to be very important when
we use our script. Now we also said that the Prerequisite Installer needs an accompanying DLL file, and
the one that it needs is this one down here, vcruntime140.dll. Those are the two files that we need. So
we're going to copy those. We're going to go back out here, we're going to go into our C drive and in the
root of our C drive we're going to create that new folder, that new folder that we said we were going to
call SharePoint2016. That leaves no doubt what belongs in that folder, does it? It's very clear. But you
could call that folder Bob if you wanted to, just so long as you know what it is, know what's in it and
know where it is. Alright we're going to open that folder up and I'm going to paste our two files. Now let
me pause here for a minute to discuss why we just put those two files in. That's all that's necessary to do
what we need to do. You can, if you want to, copy all of the SharePoint files and put them in this folder
as well. Now why would you do that, you ask? Well it's possible for you to go ahead and create this as a
network share so that you can do an entire offline or scripted installation of SharePoint to all of your
servers from that network share, and in which case you would need all of the files. That's going to be
another course for another time, whether it's me, whether it's one of my colleagues, but for us today
the only thing we're going to do is install the prerequisites. So this is all we need, these two files. Now
the next thing we need to do is start to gather up all of the other files that we need to make this happen.

Gather the Necessary Files

Alright now we need to go ahead and get all of our SharePoint2016 prerequisite files and you're
probably asking yourself, okay how do I know what those are? Where do I find them? Well you can look
online, you can go to TechNet, you can go to Microsoft, but I will be honest with you, when I was
preparing for this lesson I had some wrong information, you have to be very, very careful. And for me,
the best place to go is right at the source, right from that SharePoint disk itself. This here is the About
page or the prerequisiteinstaller.exe, basically this is its help file. Now don't strain your eyes trying to
read this list, when we get to the demo I'll show you exactly how to get to this and it'll be a little bit
bigger on the demo and you can look at it closer here. But this is, right under this, these are the files that
you need. No question. No matter what anybody else says anywhere, this is the right and proper list.
Now you can go and download these files. You can get them from Microsoft. And I'll be honest, it was a
little bit tricky trying to get all of the files, the first couple times I tried to download them from different
places and I got some corrupt files, I got some misnamed files, I got some wrong files. I'm not going to lie
to you, it's not going to be easy. And it doesn't do me any good to give you a link to where these files are
now because by the time you watch this odds are that link will no longer be valid or it will have changed
or the information on it will be wrong. You're going to have to go ahead and do some of the legwork
yourself. But this list isn't going to change, these are the files that you need, go ahead and find them,
download them and gather them together. Okay the next question is, where do these files belong?
Remember we created that SharePoint2016 folder at the root of our C drive? What we need to do now
is create a subfolder in that SharePoint2016 folder. Now I named this one prerequisiteinstallerFiles,
again, I know it's kind of long and you can name it whatever you want, but I like to be very specific. I
want to name that folder so that when anybody looks at it they say, oh that must be where the
Prerequisite Installer files are. No confusion. Whatever you name it, just make sure you know that name
and you know where it is, okay. Then we're going to go ahead and take all of those files that we
downloaded, all those prerequisite files and put them in that folder. Alright let's go ahead now and let's
do this. Alright now I want to show you how to find the definitive list of what prerequisite files you're
going to need. And there's no place better to go than SharePoint, go right to the source. So we're going
to go to our PowerShell and we're going to right click and Run as Administrator, remember we always
want to do these as a user with elevated permissions. We're going to type in the location of that
Prerequisite Installer. Remember that was in C:\SharePoint2016 and it is the PrerequisiteInstaller.exe,
then we're going to put in a space /?, hit Enter and there it is. So anytime you need it, you have any
questions, you're not sure, take a look here. These are the files that you need. So when you want them,
you know how to get them. Alright let's close this down. Now I already went ahead and downloaded all
of the files and, again, it's kind of tricky, be very, very careful, make sure that those file names match
exactly. You want to make sure you have the right version, lots of things that you have to be on the
lookout for. We're going to open up the Downloads folder and there they are, there is all of the files that
we need. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select them all, then copy them, and we're going to go
back to our C drive, back to that SharePoint2016 folder and like I told you, we were going to create a
new subfolder and we want to name it (Typing) PrerequisiteinstallerFiles, and I know that's a mouthful
to say and a lot to type and you don't have to call it that, that's what I do because like I said, I want there
to be no doubt about what's in that folder. I want it to be very, very clear. So I'm going to open that
folder and paste in all of my prerequisite files and now we're ready to go. We're getting there. Now
we're going to go and install the server roles that we need.

Install the Server Roles

Alright now we need to go ahead and install those server roles. There's a couple of server roles that our
server needs, and we don't have to download anything for this. All we need is our server media, we
need that, in our case it's Windows Server 2012 R2, we need that disk or that ISO and we need it either
inserted or mounted, depending on what it is, and the script will find those files that are on that media.
And the roles that we need to add are the application server role and the web server role or IIS, two
very old familiar friends probably to any of you who have had any experience with servers, nothing new
and exciting here. Now we have a little script to go ahead and install those and, again, don't strain your
eyes trying to read this or decipher it. I'm actually going to include this script and our next PowerShell
script with the course so you'll have them and you can use them, you don't have to use them, whatever.
You can write your own. You can find them on the internet. I just want to give you the ones that I'm
using here so that you can have them to take a look at, to work with, to modify, do whatever you want
with. Now I want to show you one thing though at the end of this script. See we have source and then I
have in brackets your source path. Obviously we don't leave that there, we need to put in the path to
where that media is. For example if it's mounted as D or if you have a DVD drive and a physical disk and
it's the D drive, it will be D:\Sources\sxs. Now the Sources\sxs is not going to change, that's constant,
you need that there. What will change is the drive letter. Now in our case, our media will actually be
mounted as E, so it will be E: et cetera. So, but I just want to make sure that you understand that that's
very important that path, the script needs to find that file. And if you look at the script, this is just
basically a list of all of the things that we're installing, and if you're familiar with server at all, these
things are probably very familiar to you. Now I want to go ahead and talk a little bit about permissions.
There's a couple of things here, I just want to remind you of, make you aware of. You've got to make
sure that that account has permission to run scripts, to run that PowerShell script. You've got to check
that PowerShell execution policy. Now I have it set to unrestricted, that's so I'm not going to have any
problem. Now if there's a policy in place or there's something that you don't want to do, you can just
change it, run the script, and change it back, but you're going to have the least amount of problems with
it being unrestricted. Then, again like I told you earlier, make sure that that SPINSTALL account, or
whatever your install account is, is part of the local administrators group on that machine, alright. Let's
go ahead now and let's do this. Alright we're back on our application server and like I said, we have to
get out our Windows Server media. So I have that ISO right here, we're going to go to our Windows
Explorer, go to my ISO folder and mount that disk. That's all I need to do and I need to check to make
sure where it is mounted, and you'll see here it is mounted as Drive E. So we have to make sure in our
script at the very end where in my example we had D:\Sources\sxs, we need to make sure that that is E
and not D because that is where our disk is mounted. Alright let's find that script, it's here in my
Documents folder. It is my server role script, and you'll see right down here that I have it saved with E as
the drive. Very important so it knows to look for those files there, alright. This is a pretty simple process.
We simply need to go down to our PowerShell and don't do what I just did, just do a quick click, we need
to right click because, remember, we need to do all of these things as a user with elevated permissions.
So I'm going to right click and choose Run as Administrator. Then we're going to go and copy this and
paste it in. The only thing we've got to do now is hit Enter and that's a good sign. That lets me know that
the script was fine, it's finding the media, and it's starting to go ahead and collect those files and install
them. So as you can probably imagine, this is going to take a little bit of time so you don't have to sit
here and watch, I will, and I'm going to pause the recording and I'll be back when it's done. And we're
back and we see that we have success - true, restart needed - no, exit code - success, feature result -
application server HTTP activation, and it's going to list all of the things that were in the script that we
asked it to install. This is great, we have no PowerShell red. Everything is just fine. Now I know it says no
restart needed, but I like to go ahead and restart anyway, so I'm going to do that, and when I come back
we're going to go ahead and run that Prerequisite Installer, run that script, and get all of our
prerequisites on here and get wrapped up and get ready for us to actually install SharePoint, alright.
We'll be right back.

Run the PowerShell Script

Alright before we go ahead and run the PowerShell script, I want you to take a quick look at it here, I
want to point out a couple of things to you. Again, don't try to hurt your eyes writing this down, I will
include this script with the course, and we'll see a better look at it. It's a little funky in here because of
the limitations of PowerPoint, we'll see it a little bit better when we get to the demo, but I want to point
out two things to you, at the top here you see our path is C:\SharePoint2016\PrerequisiteInstaller.exe.
The SharePoint2016 is that folder we created at the root of C and then the PrerequisiteInstaller.exe, we
put it in that folder. Remember we went ahead and gathered that so this is the proper path and this is
going to find that file, start that file, that PrerequisiteInstaller.exe, and then we have our argument list.
Now the next thing I want you to take a look at is the next path, C:\SharePoint2016, then we have
\PrerequisiteInstallerFiles, that's that subfolder that we created, \ and then it's looking for those files.
This is where we're going to have all of those files. This is where we put all of those files that we
downloaded and you can see very, very clearly if you look on down this list, we have that path before
every single one of these files, so that the script doesn't have to try and figure out where they are, giving
it the correct path it's going to find them and it's going to run them, alright. This is why I kept telling you
all along, make sure that that path is right, make sure that you have the names of those folders, they can
be whatever you want, but just make sure you know what they are, make sure they're spelled right, a
spelling mistake can just stop you dead in your tracks, and we can go ahead now and let's run this thing
and get our prerequisites installed so we can continue on and finish up installing SharePoint 2016.
Alright here we are, back in our application server and we're ready to go. We have everything in place,
we're ready to run that final script, get all of our prerequisites installed. So let's go ahead, let's take a
look at that script one more time, I keep it here in my Documents folder, here it is. I'm going to open
that up and you can see it's the same script that we had in the PowerPoint slide, I know it looks as little
bit different because the layout, I can play around more with the size of this window more than I could
with PowerPoint, and if I go ahead and take the word wrap off you'll see that it is all one long string. It's
exactly the same, our SharePoint2016 folder, looking for the Prerequisite Installer on the first line and
then the rest of the way SharePoint2016 with the subfolder of PrerequisiteInstallerFiles and then all of
the individual files. So this is good, it's ready to go. I have it saved here as a proper PowerShell script, a
.ps1 file. So we're going to copy that and we're going to put it in that SharePoint2016 folder, that top
folder because it wants to be there. And we're going to kick off the script and get ready to go. We'll go
down to PowerShell, Run as Administrator, type in our path to that script (Typing), SharePoint2016, and
it is looking for the name of my script, which is PreReqInst and just like I told you with the file folders,
you can name them whatever you want just as long as you know what it is, you have the path right, and
you type it correctly, .ps1. All you've got to do is hit Enter. Look at that, there is our SharePoint 2016
product preparation tool. We saw this when we did the online installation. And I want to show you
something before we go any further. Notice that I don't even have the SharePoint disk mounted, it's not
here. Everything that the Prerequisite Installer needs is in that SharePoint2016 folder or in the subfolder
PrerequisiteInstallerFiles. Alright let's hit Next. Accept the license term and hit Next and there you go,
it's starting to do its thing. Now we're going to have to have a restart, just like we did with the offline. So
when we get to that point I'll come back and you can see that, but this is going to take a little while so
I'm going to pause here and I'll be back in just a few minutes. Alright so we're back and you'll see our
system needs to restart to continue. So we're going to go ahead and do that and while it's restarting I
will pause and we'll come back when it's done. Alright let's go ahead, let's sign back in and you'll notice
that I'm signed in as the SPINSTALL account. We're going to sign in and unlike when we did the offline
installation, we're not going to have to remount the disk, this is going to pop up and start running again
any second now, so hang in there with me. There you go. So we didn't have to remount the disk like we
did the last time, you know, so that's one advantage. But if you had your SharePoint media, like I said,
on a disk in the actual physical drive and you were doing the online installation, this is what would have
happened as well there. And as you can see, that installation is now complete, it was very quick, very
fast once we restarted, and we are all done. Our SharePoint application server here is now ready to get
SharePoint installed. We have the prerequisites. We have all our server roles and features and in our
next module we're going to go ahead and start to install the actual SharePoint bits, alright. But first it's
time for our review.

Summary

Alright now it's time for us to review what we talked about. We started with the online installation and
that couldn't have been easier. All we had to do was mount that ISO or insert the media into the drive
and go to the splash screen and you didn't even have to go to the splash screen, you could just click on
the PrerequisiteInstaller.exe and it did everything for us, it downloaded all the files, it installed them,
prompted us to restart, and we were good. Very simple, very fast, very easy. But that isn't always
something that we had the ability to do, the next thing we did was took a look at the offline installation.
And first thing we had to do was gather up our files. We needed the prerequisite.exe and that
vcruntime140.dll, those are the two files that the Prerequisite Installer needs. Then we went ahead and
we created a folder in the root of our C drive and we named ours SharePoint2016 and in that folder we
put those two files. The next thing we had to do was identify the prerequisite files and in my opinion the
easiest place to do that was go to the PrerequisiteInstaller.exe About page, and how did we get there?
In PowerShell from an elevated user, remember we run as administrator, because my media was
mounted at E, my path was E:\prerequisiteinstaller.exe space ?/ and it brought up that About page, and
there's no question about what files you need. Then we downloaded those files and admittedly
downloading the files, it is a little bit tricky, I know. Then we gather them in that subfolder that we
created in our SharePoint2016 folder, which was the folder that we created at the root of C, and we
named it in our case here PrerequisiteInstallerFiles. You can name these folders anything you want, just
make sure you know what they are, you spell them right, and that you have the path right. Next we
added the server roles. Now this was fairly simple. All we had to do, again, was mount the ISO or insert
the server media, in our case it was Windows Server 2012 R2. We had to make sure that that correct
path was in the script and in our case it was E:\Sources\sxs. And then we go ahead and run that in
PowerShell, again, run as an administrator. And once that's done we get out our PowerShell script, we
make sure that the path is correct. I can tell you, I double check these things every time I run them just
to make sure, but I'm a little bit paranoid in that respect, there's nothing I hate more than running a
PowerShell script and you get all that red text, it drives me crazy. So I've got to make sure my path is
correct, move that script to the folder at the root of C and in our case that was the SharePoint2016
folder, and run the script, make sure you run it as an administrator, and if you've got everything right,
you did all these steps, everything is where it's supposed to be, the script, the paths are correct, you're
done. Your prerequisites are installed, you have one restart and you're done, ready to go ahead and
install SharePoint. And that's what we're going to do in the next lesson. We're going to go ahead and
start putting SharePoint on all of our servers with all our different server roles and it's going to be a lot
of fun. But that's it for this lesson, thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.
Installing SharePoint and Creating the Farm

Overview

Hi welcome to Pluralsight. My name is Bill and this module is Installing SharePoint and Creating the
Farm. We're going to start this module by installing SharePoint 2016. I know, I know, that's kind of been
the point of this whole course. But this time we're actually going to do it, we're actually going to get our
hands on our SharePoint servers and start that installation going. Doing that is also going to create our
SharePoint Farm for us and we do that using the Products Configuration Wizard. That will go ahead and
create our databases in SQL for us and when those are done we'll go and take a look at SQL and examine
those databases and make sure they are exactly what we're looking for. Then we will go and add our
Servers to the Farm, our Application Server is where we're going to start. We'll add our Front-End
Server, our Distributed Cache Server, and our Search Server. Alright, sounds like a lot of fun, doesn't it?
Well it's going to be, so why don't we go ahead and let's get started.

Installing SharePoint

Alright we are here on our application server. This is where we're going to start installing our SharePoint
2016 and we're also going to create our Farm from this machine, so let's go ahead and let's get to that.
We're going to open up our SharePoint ISO and I'll run the splash screen again just because I enjoy it so
much. And we're going to click on Install SharePoint Server. We can actually close the splash screen
now. The first thing it's going to ask us to do is enter in the product key. Alright I'm going to pause here
for a second while I put that in. Alright I've got that in, we'll go ahead now and press on Continue, accept
the terms of the license agreement, and now it's going to ask us to choose a file location. Now up here
at the top, this is where we're going to install our SharePoint bits and by default it's here at C:\Program
Files/Microsoft Office Servers. You can leave it there or you can put it wherever you want simply by
clicking on browse. For our purposes, I'm fine right there where it is so I'm not going to change it. Now if
you take a look at the second paragraph there it says - if you intend to use this computer as a search
server, which we are not, this is our application server, however the search index files will be stored on
the local drive, these files can be very large. So basically it's just telling you that if this is your search
server, make sure you've got enough room wherever you choose to store those index files. Now this
isn't our search server so it doesn't really matter to us and even if it was, remember I'm the only one
using this SharePoint Farm so my index files are not going to be very big, so I am still going to leave that
on our C drive, just like I am now. But again, you can change it simply by clicking on the Browse button.
Alright we're going to go ahead and click off the install and as you can probably guess, this is going to
take a little bit of time, so I'm going to pause the recording here and I'll come back when we need to do
something. Alright and we're back. And the first part of our installation is completed and you'll see now
it's prompting us to run the Configuration Wizard, which we're going to do. But I want you to notice that
there is a little checkbox there that if we uncheck it won't run the Configuration Wizard. Now why would
it give us that option? Well we're going to talk about that in just a little while. But before we go ahead
and run the Configuration Wizard, Microsoft recommends for continuity sake that you install SharePoint
on all of your servers in the Farm before you create the Farm. So we're going to do that. I'm going to go
ahead and I'm going to go to our other three servers, our front-end server, our distributed cache server,
and our search server and install SharePoint to this point. You don't have to watch, it's exactly the same
thing as what we've seen, but when I come back we're going to go ahead, I'm going to leave this right
here like it is, and when I come back we're going to go ahead and we're going to run this Configuration
Wizard.

Create the SharePoint Farm

Alright I've gone ahead and installed the SharePoint bits to this point on all of my servers. Now we're
going to go and run the Configuration Wizard. Now before we go ahead and get started with this, I want
to make a statement here about something. We're on our application server, and because we're on our
applicaton server that means that Central Admistration. Central Administration website will be hosted
here on our application server. Now, if you want to follow the strict Microsoft guidelines for the
Streamlined Topologies and MinRole They say to put Central Administration on the web front end or if I
may quote though, it can be put on a batch processing server if security policies of an organization
mandate this. To be honest most organizations are not going to want you to put Central Administration
on their web front end server. Because, if somebody knows the port they can access Central
Administration very easily. You don't want that. So, like Microsoft says, it's okay to put this on another
server. And since our application server already has the foundation web application installed on it it's
okay for us to go ahead and have the application server host central administration. and that's what
we're going to do. And when we do this again later with Powershell, we're also going to go ahead and
run those commands from our application server so that the application server hosts our central
administration website, okay? Let's keep going. Welcome to SharePoint Products, blah, blah, blah, we're
going to go ahead and click Next. And the following services may have to be started or reset during
configuration, and that's fine. IIS, SharePoint Administrations Services, and SharePoint Timer Service, so
that's fine, click Yes. Now, this is where we have to make our choice, do we connect to a server farm
that is already existing? Well we haven't created one yet so that's not an option. We have to create a
new server farm, and that's what we're going to do, we're going to click on that radial button and
choose Next. And it wants the database server, where are the databases going to be created? Well, it's
on our SQL Server, remember? And the name of that is SQL 1, and that's a separate server and it's going
to create the SharePoint_Config database. Next we want to specify the database access account. Read
what it says, select an existing Windows account that this machine will always use to connect to the
configuration database. That's going to be our Farm account. So it needs to be a domain account, unless
this was a standalone installation on a single server, but it's not, so we have to put in our domain and
spfarm, and then our password and Next. Now our passphrase. We have to go ahead and create a
passphrase and we're going to need this when we want to join our other servers to the farm. And the
passphrase has to have at least 8 characters and it has to have at least 3 of the following 4 character
groups, your English uppercase letters A through Z, English lowercase letters A through Z, numbers 0
through 9, or the special characters, the non-alphabetic characters, things like quotation marks,
ampersand, pound signs, dollar signs, anything but a space, no spaces. Make sure you write this down
somewhere or you have it so that you don't forget what it is because we're going to need it later and
we'll choose Next. Alright now we need to go ahead and specify the server role and this is our
application server, so that's what we're going to choose, and notice it says server applications, services,
and components that server back-end requests, for example search crawl requests belonging on
application servers, these servers are optimized for high throughput. And if you remember, I told you
that earlier in our second module. And these were, remember we were talking about the MinRole, these
are the different roles. Front-end application, distributed cache, search, which was optional and custom,
which again supports all of those legacy topologies and then the single server farm. We're doing a full
MinRole deployment here and we're going to use front-end application distributed cache and we are
going to include the search server as well. So right now, we're setting this up as our application server,
so we're going to choose Next, and we have to specify a port number. We can use this number that is
there or we can create our own and if you notice right over here that port number must be between 1
and 65535. For our example here I'm going to keep it very simple and just make it easy to remember as
12345. And we are going to set it up as NTLM not Kerberos and choose Next. And there it goes, it's
creating our Farm. We're going to pause here and I'll come back when it's done. Alright and we're back
and we can see that our configuration was successful. Let's go down the list here, configuration
database server, well it was our SQL Server; our configuration database name to SharePoint_Config, we
saw that; host the central administration web application, yes; central administration URL, it's giving us
the URL for central administration; authentication provider NTML; and a local server role, application.
Well that's great, that's exactly what we wanted. So let's click on Finish and it's going to go right over
here to Central Admin for us. It takes a little while for it to find it because it's the first time we're getting
there, so have patience. And we're going to tell Internet Explorer to use the recommended settings,
we're going to open this up. Do we want to sign up for the customer experience improvement program?
Again, it's up to you, I always say Yes because I would like Microsoft to know when I'm having problems
so that maybe they can fix it, and we'll choose OK. How do we want to configure our SharePoint Farm?
Well, yes walk me through the configuration of my farm using this wizard or no I will configure
everything myself. Well let me tell you, this is beyond the scope of this course. Configuring our farm is
my next course. So we're going to now go ahead and simply hit Cancel because no we do not want the
wizard to do it for us, we're going to configure everything ourselves at a later date. And here we are, in
Central Administration. But we don't need to dwell on that just yet and before we go ahead and
continue on, I want to go over to our SQL Server and take a look. When we're done there, then we're
going to go ahead and add our other servers to the farm. So bear with me while I go ahead and move us
over to SQL. Alright now we're on our SQL Server and we're going to fire up our SQL Management
Studio. It takes a little bit of time here to get running. We're going to connect to our database, our SQL
instance, and we're going to click here for databases, and we see there is that SharePoint_Config
database. Remember when we were filling out the Configuration Wizard it asked us to provide that
name and we just kept it at this, kept it at the default. But I had also created this database, the
SharePoint_AdminContent_3a360ef9-f8f, well you get the picture, that's our central admin database,
and remember when I pointed out that we had the option to uncheck that little box and not run the
Configuration Wizard and I said why would you do that and that we would talk about that later? Well
this is later. When you use the Configuration Wizard, remember it did not ask us for the name of this
database, it didn't provide us with an option to enter in the name of this database. It did the default,
SharePoint_AdminContent and then it added a GUID, a G-U-I-D, which is an acronym for globally unique
identifier, and that's this really long string of numbers and letters here. Now this can be problematic,
especially with 3rd party software. Many SharePoint admins and many SQL admins will yell at the top of
their lungs, never create a database with a GUID. It's entirely up to you, it's at your discretion whether
you want this or not. I'm going to show you in the next module how to go ahead and create our farm
and create this database without a GUID. We're going to need a little bit of PowerShell to make that
happen. But for now, this is what we have, okay. Alright we can go ahead and we can close this, and
we're going to go ahead now and we're going to go to our front-end server and we're going to join that
to our farm. We're going to add that server to our SharePoint Farm, alright. So hang in there with me
while we switch servers yet again.

Add a Server to the Farm

Alright we're here on our front-end server now and I've already run the first part of the installation like I
told you I would, to this point, run the Configuration Wizard. Now I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to
close this, I'm not going to run the Configuration Wizard like that because that's not the only way you
can get the Configuration Wizard to run. If you've already closed that, don't panic. We're going to go
here and we're going to simply look up SharePoint and we see our Products Configuration Wizard here,
so I'm going to pin that to the Start, I'm also going to do the Management Shell and Central
Administration. So let's go ahead and we will kick off the Configuration Wizard, it looks familiar, just like
we saw on our application server, but it's going to be a little bit different. We're going to go ahead and
click Next, yes we know it's okay to restart those things. Now before because we didn't have a farm, we
had to create a server farm, now we're going to connect to an existing server farm. So we will click on
Next and it's looking for our database again, our database server, which we know is SQL 1, and we're
going to ask it to retrieve the database names. We're going to click there. We'll see that it found that
SharePoint_Config database, that's exactly what we wanted, so that's a good sign, that lets us know that
it sees the SQL Server and it sees that database. We're going to click Next and it's asking for our
passphrase, remember I told you it was going to do this. We wanted to make sure that we had our
passphrase written down or we knew what it was because we were going to need it again to go ahead
and join this server to the farm. Now we have to specify our server role, this is our front-end server, and
we see the server role description is servers, applications, services, and components that serve user
requests belong on the front-end web servers. These servers are optimized for fast performance. That
sounds great. We're going to go ahead and click Next, but before we do that, take a look down here.
Single-Server Farm is grayed out because we're adding another server, it already knows the boat has
sailed on a Single-Server Farm, so we're going to go ahead and click Next. This is all set up. It's got our
Database Server SQL 1, our Configuration Database and the Local Server Role, Front-end. We're going to
go ahead and click Next and once more this is going to take awhile to go ahead and run. So I'm going to
pause here and I'll be back when it's done. And we're back and once again our configuration is
successful. In the local server all you'll see is front-end. Alright I need to go ahead, it's going to open up
and we're going to get the same prompt here again that we had the last time. Do we want to configure
SharePoint? We're going to say no. And it brings us back to Central Administration. Alright we need to
do this two more times and I'm going to streamline that process, so bear with me while I switch on over
to our distributed cache server. Alright we're now on our distributed cache server and we're going to
kick off our Configuration Wizard, go through Next, Next, join to our existing server farm, and again the
same process that we saw before, it's not going to be any different for this, that's a good sign that we've
connected, and we will add our passphrase, choose Next. This will be our distributed cache server and
service application services and components that are required for a distributed cache belong on
distributed cache servers. Optionally you can configure these servers to load balance farm traffic. Alright
we will choose Next. That looks good and we'll let it go and we'll come back when we're done. And we
see here that our configuration has been successful, so we'll finish this, and once more it takes us to
Central Administration and we will cancel that configuration. Alright one last one, we're going to do our
search server and we're going to call it a day. Alright we're here on our search server now, I've already
kicked off our Products Configuration Wizard and we're joining it to an existing farm, once again we
have to put in our SQL Server, look for that SharePoint_Config database, select Next. Enter in our
passphrase, specify this server to be our search server, and the service application, services, and
components that are required for search belong on search servers. Now before we go on, I want to
direct your attention to this button, Advanced Settings. We're going to go ahead and click there because
there's really only one option in here and it is do we want this server to host the central administration
web application? Well we don't. This is our search server. And by default it's already set to do not use
this machine to host the website. We could change that by clicking on that radial button that says use
this machine to host the website, but we don't have to do that because central administration has
already been hosted on our application server. And I know that we didn't see this option when we were
running the Products Configuration Wizard on our application server. That is because the application
server was where we started, that's the machine we created the farm on and by default SharePoint
automatically puts that central administration web application on that server where you're creating the
farm and that is if you're using these wizards. It's already on our application server, which is fine, I'm
perfectly okay with it being there, that's where I wanted it. This Advanced Settings button was available
when we added our front-end server to our farm, our search server, and our distributed cache server.
We just left it alone because by default it's already chosen do not use this machine to host the website
because by default it already put that website on the very first machine that we created the farm on and
that was our application server, which was where we wanted it. So I just wanted to point that out to
you, and this will come into play again in our next module, I'll point this out again, but for now we're
going to go ahead and simply click OK and Next and we're going to let this finish configuring our
SharePoint products and we'll be back when it's done. And we're back and we can go ahead and finish
this up. And one last time to our Central Administration, we can cancel that again, and we can look up at
our URL and see there it even lets us know that Central Administration is on that application server. So
http://application: and then the port 12345 that we set. And that's how we go ahead and install
SharePoint 2016 and create the SharePoint Farm using the wizard. Now in our next module we're going
to go ahead and roll back, do this again, but use a little PowerShell instead of running the Product
Configuration Wizard so that we can create that database without that GUID, okay. Alright but before
we do that, let's go ahead and let's have a little bit of a review.
Summary

Now let's review what we talked about. We started by installing SharePoint 2016. We went ahead and
we did that, we loaded up SharePoint on all of our servers first before we created our SharePoint Farm.
Remember this is the Microsoft recommended way of doing it, for continuity sake. Get the SharePoint
bits on all of your servers before you go ahead and create that farm. Next that's what we did, we
created the farm. We started on our application server, we went through the process, we ran that
Configuration Wizard and we had to identify our SQL Server, remember it was SQL 1, we had to do that
so that SharePoint would know where to look to create those databases. We had to add the farm
account credentials, that was our spfarm account, because remember it talked about how you have to
sign in here, you have to give the credentials to the account that will always be used to access the
databases, and that is our farm account, in our case it was that spfarm. Then we had to create that
passphrase and the passphrase was used and will be used every time we want to join another server to
our farm and once we got that running we saw that it created a configuration database, that was our
SharePoint_Config, and remember it gave us the option to name that, but we just went with the default,
why complicate things for ourselves. And it also created that central administration database. And
remember it did not give us anywhere to go ahead and give that a name, it did it by default and it added
that GUID, and like I told you, GUIDs, depending on your point of view, can be bad. The next thing we
did was went back and added the rest of our servers to the farm. Once again, we went to each of those
servers, ran the Products Configuration Wizard, and we added our front-end, distributed cache, and
search servers. We saw all we had to do was pick that server role pretty much, identify the database and
that was our SQL 1, and remember when we did that it gave us the little dropdown so that we could
choose that configuration database, which we had named by default SharePoint_Config. And just seeing
that was a great sign that everything was going well. Lastly, we took a look at the advanced settings and
we saw that advanced settings gave us the option of where we wanted to host central administration,
but because we ran the Products Configuration Wizard on our application server to create a farm it
automatically hosted Central Administration on that server and that was fine. We're absolutely fine with
having it there. Alright in our next module we're going to go ahead, we're going to roll this back a little
bit and we're going to create our farm over again, but we're not going to use the Products Configuration
Wizard, this time we're going to do it with a little bit of PowerShell, and what that's going to let us do is
name the central administration database whatever we want to name it and not have that GUID
attached to the end of it, alright. But that's it for this lesson, thanks for listening, and I'll see you next
time.

Creating the Farm Using PowerShell

Overview

Hi welcome to Pluralsight. My name is Bill and this module is Create the Farm Using Powershell. Okay,
we saw in our last module when we used the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard to create our
farm, it also created our databases, but it did not give us the opportunity to name the database for
central administration. It used the default and added that GUID at the end, that was that long string of
numbers and letters. And we already said that can be bad, especially if you're using any 3rd party
software. A lot of your SQL administrators are going to tell you never create a database with a GUID. So
what we're going to do in this module is create the farm and those databases using PowerShell. We're
going to start this module by taking a look at those PowerShell commands. We're going to look at those
so that we can see how we go ahead naming the databases with PowerShell. We can name that central
administration database whatever we want and it will not have that GUID. Then we're going to create
the databases by running those PowerShell commands. Then we'll go ahead, we'll move on and finish
the installation using the Products Configuration Wizard. This is pretty much going to be the exact same
process that we saw in the previous module, and then the last thing we'll do is add an additional server,
we'll add our front-end server, join them to the farm, again, using the Products Configuration Wizard.
It's going to be a lot of fun, a lot of really great stuff, so why don't we go ahead and let's get started.

The PowerShell Commands

Alright let's take a look at those PowerShell commands, we're going to start with a very simple New-
SPConfigurationDatabase. Then we have to tell it what the database names is going to be, and the
configuration database we're going to use SharePoint_Config. Now if you remember when we did this
with the wizard, that was the default name, that's what it chose, and we're fine with that. It didn't add a
GUID on the end of this and I don't know why it does for central administration and not
SharePoint_Config, but we're going to take it just the way it is. We can name it whatever we want, but
I'll just go ahead and leave it SharePoint_Config. Then we have to identify our database server and that
was SQL 1. Then the AdministrationContentDatabaseName and this is where we get the opportunity to
name that database for central administration. Now I'm going to name it SharePoint_Admin_Content.
Remember, you don't ever want to have spaces in your database names, you can't have spaces, it won't
allow it. So SharePoint_Admin_Content, and again, you can name it whatever you want, but this is what
I chose to use because once more, I don't like any confusion. I want anybody who comes looking at our
databases to say, wow that must be the SharePoint administration content database. It's pretty
straightforward. And you'll notice, no GUID at the end. Now if you've done this before with SharePoint
2013 you're probably looking at these commands and saying, hey these look awful familiar, this is
exactly what I did in SharePoint 2013, and you're right. To this point it is exactly the same. We have to
go ahead and just add one more command and that is the local server role. If you remember when we
ran the wizard, it prompted us to select what server role this server was going to take, and in our case it
says Application because I'm going to run this on our application server because that's where I want to
host the website for central administration. So this is all we need, now let's go ahead and let's run these
commands and create those databases.

Create the Databases

Okay here we are on our application server. Now I have already run the SharePoint installation up to this
point. In fact, I've done it on all of our servers. But we don't want to run the Configuration Wizard like
we said, so we're going to uncheck that and click on Close. Now I'm going to go and get out our
SharePoint Management Shell and while I'm here I'm also going to go ahead and pin the rest of these
things to our Start menu. We'll click on our SharePoint Management Shell, and what did I forget to do?
You're right, I forgot that we need to go ahead and run as a user with elevated permissions, we need to
run as administrator. There we go. That's what I want to do. Now I already have a little text file here
with my PowerShell commands, and there it is, simply going to copy that. You'll see it's exactly the same
as what I showed you on the slides. I'm going to paste it in here, and when we hit Enter it brings up the
Windows PowerShell credential requirements. This is where if you remember when we used the wizard,
we had to put in those farm credentials, that's what we need right here. So we're going to add in our
spfarm credentials (Typing) and choose OK. Now look at our PowerShell, it is prompting us to create that
passphrase. Again, something else we did in the wizard. So we simply want to enter that in, because
remember we will need this to add more servers to our farm, and when I hit Enter and there it's going to
sit while it goes ahead and creates our databases and starts working on creating the farm. So we have
nothing now but to wait and this is going to take a little while so I'm going to pause the video and I'll
come back when we're done. And we're back and we see nothing, nothing has happened, well except
for we have our prompt back, which means that everything is done. So let's go ahead now and let's go to
our SQL Server and check on our database. Alright we're here on our SQL Server and let's get out our
SQL Management Studio and we're going to take a look at those databases and see just exactly what
happened. We'll connect, go to Databases, and we see there they are, SharePoint_Config, and our
SharePoint_Admin_Content with no GUID at the end. Success. Alright so now what we need to do is go
back to our application server and finish the installation.

Finish the Installation

Alright we're back on our application server and we need to finish the installation, so all we need to do is
get out our SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard, again click Next. Yes we already know about all of
that. And see it found that database server and the configuration database and we do not want to
disconnect from the server farm so we'll click Next. Now one last task that we do need to do is specify
that port and I'm going to keep it simple once again and just give it 12345 and our security
authentication will be NTLM, we'll click Next. And there you go. Now it's going to go ahead and continue
this wizard for a few minutes so I'll pause here and when we come back we'll be all done. And we're
back, and we'll see our configuration is successful. SQL 1 is our database server, our configuration
database name is SharePoint_Config. Are we hosting the central administration web application? Yes we
are. And the URL for central admin is http://application/12345/ and our authentication is NTLM. So
everything looks good. We are done here with this server. Now it's going to go ahead and open up
Central Admin for us and, again remember, because this is the first time we're accessing central admin
it's going to take a little bit of time. Yes we will use the recommended settings. No--Ah, yes we'll say we
wish to participate. And no we will configure everything ourselves in another course. And there we have
it, Central Administration. Alright we're going to go ahead, we're going to close this down, we're going
to get off of our application server and we're going to go to our front end server and join that to the
farm.

Add Additional Servers

Alright we're on our front-end server and we're going to go and simply get out our SharePoint Products
Configuration Wizard once more and join this server to our newly created farm. We'll hit Next and yes
we know about IIS and all of that. And we do want to connect to an existing server farm. We'll click Next.
And remember we had to do this before, so we've got to identify our database server and retrieve the
configuration database name, there it is, all looking good, everything's going great. Click on Next and
this takes a little bit of time while it searches out and makes sure it can connect to that SharePoint
configuration database. And we need our passphrase, click Next. We have to specify our server role.
Remember we did that PowerShell for our application server, but in this one we're going to have to go
ahead and just do it here, and this is our front-end server, so that's just fine. We'll choose Next. This all
looks good, we'll choose Next and there we go. It's running our wizard and it'll finish up this installation
and we'll come back when it's done. And we can see once more that our configuration has been
successful. Now this needs to be done on our other two servers, our distributed cache and our search
server, but there's no point in having you watch me do that again. We did it in our last module and it's
the exact same process that we just performed with the exception of choosing a different server role. So
I'm going to go ahead and finish this up. And that's pretty much the end of this module. And you can see
Central Administration, there we go. In our next module we're going to go ahead and take a closer look
at Central Administration and see all of the new things that we can do to manage our servers in the
MinRole. But before we go ahead and finish this one out, let's have a little bit of a review.

Summary

Now it's time to review what we talked about. We started by taking a look at the PowerShell commands.
We saw that using PowerShell we were able to name the Central Administration database whatever we
wanted without that ugly GUID at the end. Also we saw that one thing that was probably a little bit
different from what you were used to was the local server role command. We had to identify what
server role the particular server we were on was going to play and in this case it was the application
server. In fact, if we didn't use that local server role, PowerShell would have come back with a lot of red
text saying you didn't specify the server role, so we're got to make sure that that's part of this. Then we
were able to create the databases simply by running those commands. We saw that they were all good
and no ugly GUIDs. And then we had to finish the installation simply by running the Products
Configuration Wizard. And the last thing we did was add additional servers to our farm and we saw that
that was the same process as before, just using the Products Configuration Wizard. Now a lot of that, in
fact all of that, can be done also with PowerShell, as I already spoke to in previous modules. But again,
that's beyond the scope of this course, that's another course for another time, we'll have an entire
course showing how to go ahead and do all of this with PowerShell, but for our purposes I just wanted
to show you a little bit of this PowerShell because I feel that it is important to get that Central
Administration database in there without the GUID at the end. Alright now in our next module we're
going to go ahead and take a look at Central Administration and see what's new in managing our servers
with the new MinRole. Alright, well that's it for this lesson gang. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next
time.

Managing Servers in Central Administration

Overview

Hi welcome to Pluralsight. My name is Bill and this module is Managing Servers in Central
Administration. In this module we're going to take a look at Central Administration and show you how
you can, like the title says, manage your servers in there. We'll take a close look at the server roles and
the services running on our individual servers. Then we're going to take a real close look at the server
status because we're going to have some problems there, we're going to see some big red text warning
us that an upgrade is required, and we'll deal with that, we'll talk about why we need it and how to go
ahead and do it, and that's the next section. We will upgrade a server using not PowerShell, but actually
from the command line, pretty simple and basic. Then the last thing we're going to do is take a look at
changing a server role, a very, very cool new feature in SharePoint 2016, and that is done from Central
Administration. Alright sounds like a lot fun, there's going to be some great things ahead in this module,
so why don't we go ahead and let's get started.

Central Administration

Alright here we are on our application server again and we're going to go to Central Administration.
Now we've already seen, it doesn't matter which server we're on to access Central Administration, we
can get to all of them, even though it is hosted here on our application server. Now I want you to direct
your focus to this section, System Settings. We're going to go ahead and we're going to click there. In
our first section up here that says Servers, these are the options we're going to look at. We're going to
start with manage the servers in this farm. And we see, scroll down here so we can see all of our servers
listed, over here on the left in this first column we see the name of the server, it has our four servers and
our SQL Server included. Second column is the SharePoint Products Installed, we see they're all
SharePoint Server 2016. Now our third column we see the server role. Remember we assigned that
server role as we were installing SharePoint on each of these servers, the application server, distributed
cache server, front-end, and search. So it has those server roles. We go to the next column, which is
Compliant, and we see that all of our servers are compliant. Now in the following column, this is the one
I really want you to take a good look at, Services Running. We look down here and we can see all of the
different services that are running on each server and how did it know to do that? We didn't do that, we
didn't say put these services on this server, that's part of the MinRole, one of the advantages, and as I
tried to explain this to you time and time again earlier, really great advantage of our new MinRole
topology is that it automatically puts the proper services on those servers. We don't have to sit there
and guess or try and figure out, oh does this belong here, does this belong there? SharePoint now does
all of that for us, and that's really, really good. Take a good look at that, that is just awesome that we can
do that now. Now before we go on, I know you're already kind of peeking over to the Status column,
we're going to come back to that. We're going to skip that column now and see the last column that says
Remove Server and we have the option, and I will click on one these, to remove the server from the
farm, but you can see from this message that it is recommended that you uninstall SharePoint products
from the server rather than removing the server from this page. And that's because as it also says that
this does not delete information from the server such as any registry keys that were set. So basically
what it's saying is go ahead uninstall SharePoint first on that server, then go ahead and when the server
is no longer available come back here and use the option to remove server. Now like I said, before we go
ahead and talk about status, I want to go back and take a look at a couple of the other things here. We
have manage services in this farm. Okay and now over here we see the services in our farm, all of our
SharePoint services. In the Action column we see we have links to manage the service application,
disable, auto provision, manage, enable, all of the different things we can do with these service
applications, and we haven't talk about service applications at all, that is beyond the scope of this
course. We're going to have a whole course devoted to the service applications and getting them up and
running, but for now I just wanted to show you this is here and that it is available to us and we'll deal
with this more in a future course. The other thing is managing services on the server and we see again
that just about all of these services have been stopped because none of them have been enabled or
configured. We'll deal with all of this in another course, but I just wanted to show you those two things.
Now we're going to skip convert server role in this farm because that's going to be a separate clip, so
we're going to get to that in a little bit. Let's go back to our managing servers and let's talk about status.

Server Status

Okay, we saw in Central Administration under system settings that we had a link for manage servers in
this farm and that's where we just were, we were looking at all of those individually, and we kind of
passed over the Status column because I wanted to talk about it in more detail, but I'm sure you already
noticed there was some big bright red text there. Before we get into all of that, I want to show you some
of the status messages that you may encounter when you're taking a look in that Status column,
including the one that you may have already seen. And the first one is No Action Required. This is the
best. This is what you want all the time. It's nice, means you don't have to do anything, everything is
great. That's what we're shooting for. You may also from time to time see Upgrade Available, which
means that there is some upgrades available to the server, but they're not necessary to keep going on,
to keep working and having everything running just fine. It's just letting you know they're here if you
want to upgrade. And then the last one is the one that you may have already seen and that we do have
on three of our servers, Upgrade Required. We need to go ahead and fix this and that's what we're
going to do. But let's go and take a quick look at our server before we go around and taking a look at
doing these upgrades, okay. Alright we're back here in Central Administration and we see our Status
column and our first server, the application server, no action required - great. But our distributed cache
server, our front-end server, and our search server all are giving us that big red upgrade required. So,
what do we do? How do we proceed from here? What does this mean? Well, if we look down here at
the bottom we see also in red text, to get more detailed information about the local upgrade status, run
this command - stsadm.exe -o localupgradestatus. Alright, we need to run this on each one of these
servers, okay. So let's go ahead and let's start with our distributed cache server. Hang on there with me
while we go ahead and make the switch over to our distributed cache server. Alright we are here on our
distributed cache server. Let's go ahead and let's open up Central Administration. And like I said, we
need to go ahead and run this command and we need to do it in our SharePoint Management Shell, so
I'm certainly going to copy this back to my desktop and remember to right click so that I can run as an
administrator, bring this down here. Okay, I'm going to paste this here and hit Enter. Now you can see,
it's moving there a little bit, it takes a little bit of time but not a lot. Yeah, see there you go, it was very
quick, I didn't have to even stop the recording. But let's go ahead and let's take a look here at the
bottom. Content databases encountered, and over here on the left you see 1. Okay good. Content
databases still need upgrade or cannot be upgraded - 1, well that's the message, that's what we're
looking for. It tells us, we already knew that there was an upgrade required, I know this message here is
a little vague, it needs upgrade or cannot be upgraded, but in our case it needs the upgrade and we
know that. So we have one database that needs to be upgraded. So let's go ahead and let's do it. We can
also see one site collection is encountered on the content database and 0 site collections still need
upgrade. Twelve other objects have been encountered and 0 of them still need upgrade or cannot be
upgraded. So we know that we need to do that upgrade. Alright, how do we do that? Well let's go ahead
and make that happen.

Upgrade a Server

Okay before we go ahead and upgrade our server let's talk about why. Why this happened, why we need
to do this. In Windows Server 2012 SharePoint updates are part of the Windows Server updates and I've
been updating these servers all along as I've been creating this course. So what happens is it gives those
SharePoint patches, it installs them, but it needs to run the psconfig, that SharePoint Products
Configuration Wizard, to finish the patch. And it doesn't do that automatically, that's why we got
upgrade required. So when you go ahead and update your servers, you need to go and check right here,
Central Administration, and see if there are upgrades required afterwards, and that's what we have to
do. So we need to go ahead and tell it to run the psconfig and complete those upgrades, and to do that
amazingly we're not going to do it in PowerShell, we're not going to do it in our SharePoint Management
Shell, we're not going to do it in Central Administration, we're going old school with this one - we simply
need a command prompt. We'll run as an administrator and we need to find that psconfig, we need to
know where that is so that we can get to that directory before we run the command. Let me show you
where it is. It's in our Program Files, Common Files, Microsoft shared, Web Server Extensions,
SharePoint 16, and Bin. Scroll down, there it is, that's what we're looking for. It's a long path, which is
why I go ahead and I have it saved here so I don't have to try and remember it every time. We will
change directory, paste it in, hit Enter. Great, now we're in that directory. Now we're going to run the
commands that we need and that is this here, psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b. So let's copy that,
paste it, and hit Run. Wait a minute while it gets started, there you go. So this takes a little while. So I'm
going to go ahead and pause here and we'll be back when it's done. Alright I'm back and we have
completed doing our upgrades. You'll see here at the bottom, total number of configuration settings run
- 4, total number of successful configuration settings - 4, total number of unsuccessful configuration
settings - 0, that's good. Successfully stopped the configuration of SharePoint Products, configuration of
the SharePoint Products has succeeded. Excellent. It all worked just the way we wanted. So we can close
that. We can get out of here. We can close these, and let's go ahead and let's go back to Central
Administration and look at that, our distributed cache now has the ever lovely no action required, just
exactly what we were looking for. Alright so now what I need to do is go ahead and run this same
process on my front-end server and my search server. So we've already seen this once, it's the same
exact process, you don't have to watch me do it again. I'm going to do it and when I'm done I'll come
back and we'll take a look at changing the server role.

Change a Server Role

Alright we're back in our application server once more, let's get out Central Administration, manage our
servers, and look at that, we look at our Status column, No Action Required all the way down. Perfect,
that is exactly what we're looking for, alright, great. Let's go ahead and let's go back now and let's take a
look at converting server role in this farm. Now we talked about this before, we talked about the
advantages of SharePoint 2016 and the MinRole and the fact that SharePoint will now, depending on
which role you select for that server, install all of the necessary components on that server. There's no
more guess work, there's no more should I put this here, should I put that there? Where does it go? It
does it for us, and if it hasn't sunk in to you how cool that is, this will do it, this will put you over the top.
Seeing this actually in action and what we can do. Now I know we just got here, but let's go back one
more time and let's take another look at the Services Running column. I want you to go down and look
at the search server. What are the services that are running? Claims to Windows Token Service, Search
Host Controller Service, Search Query and Site Settings Service, SharePoint Server Search. We didn't go
and install each of those individually, it was all part of our SharePoint installation when we told
SharePoint that that server was going to be our search server. So let's go back and let's convert that
server, let's change it from the search server, let's make it another front-end server. We'll select from
the dropdown and we see our options, Application, Front-End, Distributed Cache, Search, and Custom.
We'll make this one Front-End and hit Apply. And working on it, this shouldn't take long. It doesn't take
too long, but I am still going to pause the recording and come back when it's done. Alright I'm back and
you can see, Central Administration Operation Completed Successfully. We'll click OK, it'll take us back
here and when we look now at our search server, we look first to the server role and see it is now front-
end, not search, and we look at Services Running, Claims to Windows Token Service, Microsoft
SharePoint Foundation Web Application. All of those search things are gone. It took them off and
installed the things that it needed for that server to be a front-end server, right here in Central
Administration, we didn't even have to touch that server. Remember we are on our application server,
not the search server. I don't know about you, but I think that's pretty cool. You want to do it again?
Sure you do. Let's go ahead and let's do it again. We're going to go back, convert server role in farm, this
time I'm going to make it a custom server. Let's go ahead and let's select that, click Apply, and once
more this shouldn't take long, I'm going to pause and come back when it's done. Alright and we're back,
our operation was completed successfully. And let's take a look at our search server now. Now the role
is custom and when we look at Services Running we see Claims to Window Token Service and Microsoft
SharePoint Foundation Web Application. It didn't do anything different there, it didn't change those
services running, because remember, we chose custom and custom is no defined role. The custom is we
can make it whatever we want, that's why it didn't uninstall or install any different services. So I just
wanted to show you that so that you could understand what's happening there. So what we're going to
do now, just because I need this to go back to being a search server, is turn this back into our search
server and once more we'll pause and I'll be back when it's done. And we're back, it has been completed
successfully, and now we look and we see once again our search server is our search server and it has
the proper services running on it. Great stuff. Well that's it for this module, but before we finish, let's
have a little bit of a review.

Summary

Now it's time to review what we talked about. We started this module by talking about how we can
manage the servers in the farm right from Central Administration. We took a close look at the server
roles and the services that were running on each server and we saw that SharePoint, and one of the
great things about SharePoint 2016 was that SharePoint is able to determine what services need to be
on which server just based on the fact that you assigned a specific role to that server during the
installation, which we did in a previous lesson. So it's really great, no more guess work, no more what do
I need to put where? SharePoint does it for us. We also took a close look at our server status and we saw
right away that we had a problem with three of our servers that the upgrade was required. And why was
this required? Well quite simply because Server 2012, although it installs the patches for us, it needs to
run the Products Configuration Wizard and it doesn't, it doesn't do that automatically. So that meant we
had to go about upgrading the server and we did that by running psconfig.exe from the command line. It
was very, very simple, very easy to do. And the last thing we did was we took a look at changing a server
role and we were able to do this with SharePoint 2016, another new great feature is that right in Central
Administration we can change the assigned role of any of the servers in our farm. In our case we
changed our search server, we changed it into a front-end server and we saw when we did that how all
of the services on that server changed. It shut down or uninstalled the services that it didn't need and
enabled the ones that it did need to be a front-end server, and then we eventually changed it back to a
search server and we saw that it went right back to running just those roles that it needed to be a search
server. The one thing that I do want you to remember is that if you choose the custom role that no
changes in the services will be made because SharePoint can't read your mind. It does not know if you
choose the custom role what services you want to run on that server, so it's not going to make any
changes to what's already on there, you're going to have to do those yourself. Now our next module is
simply going to be a review of the entire course, so go ahead and run through that one more time just to
make sure that everything is cemented in your mind. But that's it for this lesson, so thanks for listening
and I'll see you next time.
Summary

Summary

Hi welcome to Pluralsight. My name is Bill and this is the final module in our course, the summary. It's
meant to be a little bit of a review of the things we talked about, what we did, what we learned before
we go ahead and send you out on your own. We started by taking a look at the SharePoint 2016 farm
topologies. We looked at the legacy topologies first, those are for SharePoint 2007 to 2013. We talked
about the standalone and the multi-tier topologies. Then we went into 2016 and the new topologies,
the MinRole. MinRole is what is new and preferred in SharePoint 2016, but we also learned that we still
have support for those legacy topologies that we're used to. In our scenario we created a full MinRole
deployment. We started with our SQL Server and added four other servers, our front-end, application,
distributed cache, and search servers. Next we took a look at the SharePoint 2016 requirements. We
started with hardware, the Microsoft recommended minimums for evaluation and development
scenarios and for production. Then we took a look at the software, our operating systems. Now in our
scenario here we used Windows Server 2012 because at the time of this recording Windows Server 2016
is not yet ready, it's not RTM yet, so we went with 2012, which is still fully supported so we had no
problems. And we also talked about which versions of SQL Server are supported with SharePoint 2016
and we said that if you plan to use the BI capabilities of SharePoint you are going to need SQL Server
2016. And we also took a look at the prerequisite software that is required for an installation of
SharePoint 2016. And the next thing we did was install SQL Server and prepare it for SharePoint. We
started by creating service accounts in Active Directory. We created three, our SPFARM, which we used
when we created the farm, our INSTALL account, which we used when we're doing any installation of
SharePoint and SharePoint products. And lastly, our SharePoint SQL account. We also talked about the
fact that as you go on and work with SharePoint, the more you do, the more accounts you're going to
need, and which accounts you need, what they need to do, are all dependent upon what you're trying to
do. Then we actually went and did the SQL install, it was pretty straightforward, and we saw that the
SQL Management Studio was a separate installation, which was different from what we were used to in
older versions. Then we learned about MAXDOP or the max degree of parallelism. And the important
thing to remember about this is that the default in SQL is 0, but for SharePoint we need to change that
to 1. Then we went and dealt with the Windows firewall, and how we did that was we simply had to
create an inbound rule to allow traffic through port 1433 for SQL. We went ahead and created some SQL
permissions for our SPINSTALL account. We had to give it permission to create those databases in SQL.
Very, very, very important step. Next we went ahead and went about installing the SharePoint 2016
prerequisites and we saw that there were two ways to do this, the online installation, which was very
simple and easy, you just put the disk in or mount that ISO and run the prerequisite installer and it did
everything, it couldn't be easier. Then in case your servers were not online, we showed you how to do
the offline installation, and one of the tricky parts about this was gathering the necessary files and I
showed you how to go ahead and find out exactly what those files are that you need so you get the right
ones, and then of course with a little help from PowerShell we got everything up and running just fine.
Then finally after all of that we got to the point where we were going to go and kick off our SharePoint
installation and create our SharePoint farm. We did that with the Products Configuration Wizard. It
created our databases, but remember when we went and looked at the databases we discovered that
the database for Central Administration came with a GUID and that was that long string of numbers and
letters at the end and we said that that's probably not the best way to go ahead and create a database.
I've heard differing opinions about this, in my humble opinion and the opinion of many people in the
SharePoint community that I respect, you don't want to create your Central Administration database,
you don't want to create any databases with a GUID after the end. Then we went ahead and we joined
the rest of our servers to the farm and one thing that we had to do and was different from all of our
other SharePoint products in the past was specify the server role, and this is one of the great new
features of SharePoint 2016 is that by specifying the server role during the installation, SharePoint will
automatically install and enable all of the services that you need for that particular role in your farm,
there's no more guesswork. Well we talked about our Central Administration database having that
GUID, which we didn't want, so what are we to do? How do we avoid that? We rolled back and we
created our farm again using PowerShell. We created the database, this time using PowerShell it gave us
the opportunity to name that database whatever we wanted and we did it without giving it a GUID. No
GUID equals good. Then we simply ran the Products Configuration Wizard to finish the rest of the
process and join all of our servers to the farm. Lastly, we went ahead and we went into Central
Administration and specifically looked at manage servers in this farm. We could see the server roles, our
server status, and when we looked at the server status we noticed a big red upgrade required on three
of our servers, and what did that mean? Well we learned that Windows Server 2012, when it installs the
SharePoint updates, needs to run the psconfig.exe, that Products Configuration Wizard again, and it
doesn't automatically, so we had to do it ourselves. We had to upgrade that server on our own, run that
psconfig.exe and we did it very easily with a little command line magic. And then the last thing that we
did was change a server role, and this was really cool and really easy because remember we have
designated the server roles for all of our servers and if we needed to change them, we don't have to
even tough that server, we can do it all right there from Central Administration. And that's it, our
SharePoint farm is up and running and ready to go, all of our servers are ready, upgraded, humming
along just fine. That being said, that's it for this lesson. In fact, that's it for this course. I hope you
enjoyed the course as much as I enjoyed making it for you. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next
time.