We are now ready to proceed through the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard—or Configuration Wizard for short. The Configuration
Wizard performs the tasks necessary to join a server (with SharePoint
binaries installed) to an existing farm, or to provision a new farm. In
simple terms, a farm consists of one or more SharePoint servers
associated with a central SQL Server instance, containing a main
configuration database. When creating a new farm, the wizard provisions
a new configuration database and content database for Central
Administration in the designated SQL Server instance.
The Configuration Wizard is responsible for
more than adding and removing servers from a farm. After applying
service packs, the wizard also ensures that database schemas correlate
with that of the latest installed binaries and ensures database
integrity. At this stage, we are concerned only with provisioning a new
farm, as part of our installation steps.
After a brief welcome message and a popup message about restarting some services, you will see a dialog like that of Figure 1.
Assuming this is your first installation of
SharePoint 2013 and you have no existing SharePoint farm to join,
choose the option to create a new server farm, followed by a click of
the Next button.
The dialog shown in Figure 2
asks you to specify a SQL Server name and default configuration
database name for SharePoint 2013. This server is the location of the
main farm configuration database and Central Administration web site
content database. Provide the user credentials of the SharePoint farm
account for connecting to the database (see the later section on
Managed Accounts).
Note You
must assign the “Setup user administrator account,” the securityadmin
and dbcreator SQL Server security roles, during setup and
configuration. This account does not need to be in the local
admin group on the SQL Server. This account is different from the farm
account specified in this wizard.
The dialog that follows (Figure 3)
asks for the passphrase for the installation. SharePoint requires the
passphrase later when adding additional servers to the farm or removing
existing servers from the farm, so be sure to keep the passphrase safe.
You may change the passphrase later with PowerShell, but retrieving the
passphrase is impossible—you may only reset it.
Figure 4 asks you for the port number and authentication type for the Central Administration Web Application.
Like any other web site running on SharePoint, Central Administration
is a special web site running its own web application within IIS
(Internet Information Server). The Configuration Wizard
will suggest a port for the Central Administration web site, based on a
random available port on the server. I typically like to override the
chosen port with 2013 as an easy-to-remember port number.
Options for security include NTLM or Kerberos. NTLM
(Windows Challenge-Response Authentication) is the typical choice in
most installations as this is the default Windows authentication type
for most applications. However, if you are familiar with Kerberos and
have this authentication mechanism configured in your infrastructure,
then feel free to use it here.
Note The Configuration Wizard creates a new IIS Web Application on the server at the following location: c:\InetPub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\{PortNumber}.
What is interesting is that the port number in the disk location is
that originally chosen by the wizard, and not the value entered by the
administrator.
Before proceeding with the configuration, the Configuration Wizard provides a summary of the configuration you entered (Figure 5).
Double-check these values—changing them later potentially involves
removing the server from the farm and going through the Configuration
Wizard steps again.
Once the Configuration Wizard starts the
provisioning process, you should not interrupt it, unless you need to
cancel the operation and start again. A failed provision process leaves
stale databases and configurations in SQL Server, which you should
remove before attempting another run at configuration.
Figure 6 shows the provisioning process
in operation. The Configuration Wizard completes several steps
(approximately ten) in the process, which include creating databases,
creating new IIS web applications, etc.
Once complete, the Configuration Wizard should show a dialog like that in Figure 7.
If, on the other hand, the wizard encounters a problem, it will show an
error message and a link to the log file, so you may troubleshoot what
caused the error.
