SharePoint 2010 Installations

I am heading up a team here at Fpweb.net that is committed to discovering the best possible ways to get SharePoint 2010 setup in a hosted environment. Microsoft has included some very interesting features with this new release of SharePoint that we are hoping will allow us to offer even more affordable SharePoint Servers without compromising performance.

SharePoint 2010 comes with a long list of pre-requisites that you will need to wade through prior to beginning your install. These are going to vary based on what your initial OS deployment looks like. I build a bare-bone Windows 2008 and 2008 R2 Server machines. Here is what the SP 2010 installer said I needed:

• Windows 2008 server »
• Windows 2008 R2 server »

When I originally wrote about this SharePoint 2010 search error in January, we were still running in SharePoint 2010 beta and the solution was pretty ugly. We hoped we’d never see the issue again… especially in RTM. Well, guess what?!? It’s back!

Anytime I have to do anything more than twice, I start to get a twitch in my left eye which is followed by a strong desire to script it. I grew up doing this with some really ugly, but functional batch files that did anything from updating virus signatures to brushing my dog. As I have been working with SharePoint 2010 I find myself twitching every time I install it. I decided to take today to assemble a PowerShell script to do this work for me so I can do some light reading while it processes (don’t tell my boss…)

We are getting to the point where we really need to crank out install after install here for different testing scenarios, so I’ve spent some more time creating some pretty easily customizable scripts to complete our installs, plus my eye was twitching as I referred to when I used PowerShell to install SharePoint 2010.

I’ll make this one quick today. I promised a few days ago…ok you’re right, maybe it was more like a week ago in my Unattended WebApp Install, that I’d get the site collection script out there. Since then I’ve needed to test a few deployment scenarios, and I just now got a chance to get this puppy cleaned up. Don’t forget to modify the variables to suit your environment. I also included a list of templates you can use if you are installing foundation as well.

Just a quick update to my SharePoint 2010 install script: when running this script with the server media, you will get the following error in your install log: (normally found in your %temp% directory)

Not showing message because suppress modal has been set. Title: ‘Setup’, Message: ‘A product key is required when performing a basic or silent install.’
Message returned: 1
Not showing message because suppress modal has been set. Title: ‘Setup Error’, Message: ‘The key is incorrect. Verify that you have the correct key.’
Message returned: 1
Error: A pidkey is required to do silent or basic UI installs. Type: 30::InvalidCDKey. To solve this you will need to add the product key to your config.xml you are using.

As many of you know, I’ve been working on building some hosted SharePoint 2010. I’m also trying to determine exactly what each service account needs rights/permissions to. I’ll have more on the specifics of the service accounts in an upcoming post, but the main service accounts I currently have are:

1. Install account
2. Farm account

The Install service account is what I use to run the SharePoint 2010 installation and configuration wizard.

The Farm service account is the account I use for app pools and database connectivity.

When you setup the configuration wizard this way, your configuration database is created by the farm account you specify, while the admin database is created with the install account. This doesn’t cause problems… until you try to connect a second SharePoint Server to the farm.

(Update can be found at SharePoint 2010 Server Search Troubleshooting: Round 2)

“The search service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component”

The Fpweb.net SharePoint 2010 research team was having an issue with SharePoint Server 2010 search services. No matter what we would do, how we would install it, or how we got our pre-reqs, we would end up with the following error:

System Status Crawl status The search service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component. Verify that the administration component ’8d5c3da9-d70c-41f3-88af-32a4d142aaf4′ in search application ‘Search Service Application’ is in a good state and try again.