Alpesh Nakar's Blog

This is continuation of the blog post series on Reimaging SharePoint VMs on the fly.

Quick recap: In the earlier post, we have created a vhd and enabled the vhd to be bootable.

In this post, I am now logged into the vhd and ready to prepare my virtual machine for installing SharePoint 2010.

This is what we need to have configured, before we can even get started with the installation of SharePoint 2010.

1. Windows Roles and Features
   1. Active Directory
   2. Desktop Experience
   3. SMTP
   4. Windows PowerShell ISE
2. Populate Active Directory with sample users
3. Create Service Accounts for installation and management of SharePoint 2010
4. Disable IE Enhanced Security
5. Enable Remote Desktop
6. Installation and configuration of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2
7. Installation of hmailserver
8. Installation of SharePoint 2010 Pre-requisite installers
9. Firewall and Anti-Virus

Windows Server 2008 R2 Features

Active Directory

I will not walk you through on how to install Active Directory Role, but will point out resources that you can refer for populating your active directory with sample users.

Once the active directory is installed on your demo server, next step is to enable features.

Windows Roles and Features

• Todd Klindt’s Blog Post – Setup a test environment
• Set it up manually

Populate Active Directory with sample users

• One of the steps outlined above
• Download the batch file to populate dummy users for SharePoint OR
• Creating 100 AD Users with PowerShell

Create Service Accounts for SharePoint 2010

All accounts will be domain users. Specific permissions are listed in the next table.

Specific Permissions that you need to assign

Installation and configuration of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

Installation of SQL Server 2008 R2 as per these settings

Sample Databases

Download Sample Databases for Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2. Install.

SQL Configuration Manager

Open SQL Configuration Manager and under SQL Server Network Configuration, click Protocols and enable Named Pipes

SQL Management Studio

In SQL Management Studio, create a new login for dom
ain\sa-spinstall and add it to the dbcreators and securityadmin roles

Install hMailserver

Download hMailserver

Installation of hMailserver & configuration of hMailserver for SharePoint

Installation of SharePoint 2010 Pre-requisite installers

• Online or Download the prerequisites
• Install prerequisites from a network share
• Installing SharePoint 2010 prerequisites offline from a local path using arguments file

Installation of Anti-Virus

Earlier, I had blogged on how you can install an unmanaged client of Microsoft Forefront. Refer to the blog post and install the anti-virus.

Quick Recap

That’s it! We are now done creating an image with

1. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 (with Service Pack 1)
2. Active Directory – Sample Users and Managed Service Accounts for SharePoint 2010
3. Installation and configuration of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2
4. Installation of hmailserver
5. Installation of SharePoint 2010 Pre-requisite installers
6. Installation of anti-virus

Now that we have the virtual machine ready for installation of SharePoint 2010, in the next post (which will be really a very very short post compared to this one) we will make the final move before installing SharePoint 2010!