Automating your SharePoint 2010 Installation

By: Wahid Saleemi | Comments | Related: > SharePoint Administration

Problem

SharePoint Administrators often need to create several installations of SharePoint which may be used for development, testing, staging and production environments. Inconsistencies in these installations will often cause inexplicable problems and much time wasted trying to track down a specific configuration item.

Solution

Automating your SharePoint installation can provide consistency across environments and across different SharePoint Farms. By automating the installation you get added benefits such as finer control of naming conventions, reducing errors during the installation and provisioning process and ultimately saving time. Let's look at 3 options and how best to use them to automate your SharePoint installation.

Option 1

If you’re just installing SharePoint for development purposes, you can use this Script to Install SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7. Note, for Windows 7 only. This script does a nice job of getting you up and running fast. It enables all the required Windows Roles and Features, downloads and installs pre-requisites, and installs SharePoint 2010. It’s a single uncomplicated script with just a few prompts (such as for your product key).

Option 2

For a less restricted approach, such as being able to install on Windows Server, you can use SPModule. Zach Rosenfield’s blog post titled SPModule.HelloWorld() has some more specifics on how to install the module, sign it, and use the command functions. Simply use Install-SharePoint to install; New-SharePointFarm to create a new farm!

Option 3

Finally, an even more elegant option is to use AutoSPInstaller. Brian Lalancette (twitter @brianlala) has done all the work in collecting scripts, tips, and other information from various sources and has put together a very nice script. You just unzip the package into your existing SharePoint installation source (I recommend copying/extracting your SharePoint DVD/CD/ISO to a network share) and edit an XML file. Then, you simply run "launch.bat" and away it goes.

Unlike the other two options, when you’re done here, you have all the essential services you need (Managed Metadata, User Profile, Search, Secure Store, Web Analytics, and more). You can configure it NOT to install one or all of these (for example, Web Analytics). Additionally, it can create a Web Application with a site collection and even your My Site host.

Best of all, since you’re specifying your database names, they’re clean without GUIDs!