Hi

In this article series, I will explain the installation of Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) on Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 database infrastructure. First of all, i will talk about the Sharepoint product, the topology types of Sharepoint infrastructure and differences between these topology types. After that, I will choose one of these topologies and build the infrastructure based on this topology scenario.

So what is MOSS 2007? MOSS 2007 serves as a common working platform for employees. Therefore, users can share their documents with each other, discuss various topics in discussion boards, follow their jobs with the aid of workflow technology and plan the day by using calendar. Sharepoint has also strong administrative capabilities.

Of course, MOSS 2007 is not a product limited to these capabilities. It is a complicated product that can handle all the intranet, extranet and internet needs of a company with its various specifications. Therefore, it can serve for a small company or the largest one.  Because of this nature of the product, it can be installed differently according to needs and company size. There are mainly two types of installation. The installations have different topologies. These are:

1 -  Stand-alone installation

2 -  Farm installation

         a -  Small server farm

         b -  Medium server farm

         c -  Large server farm

The stand-alone installation is an installation type that mostly small companies prefer. In this installation type, all the roles and database software are installed on one server. A very big disadvantage of this installation type is; there is no transition from stand-alone topology to a farm topology. Namely, if we build our infrastructure on a stand-alone basis, we could not change the topology into a farm topology. Therefore, we have to plan carefully and if we have an environment that is propitious to expand, we could have chosen to build our infrastructure on a farm topology.

As I mentioned the roles, I want to say a few words about them. MOSS 2007 has three main roles. These are; database, web front-end and application roles. I will explain what these roles are used for, throughout the article.

The server farm topologies can be divided into three. The differences are as follows:

Small Server Farm (Figure 1): Typically includes one database server and one application server which also runs the web front-end role (totally two servers)

Figure 1: Typical small server farm topology

Medium server farm (Figure 2): Typically includes one database server, one application server and one or two web front-end server (totally 3-4 servers)

Figure 2: Typical medium server farm topology

Large server farm (Figure 3): Typically includes two or more clustered database servers, few load balanced web front-end servers and two or more application servers

Figure 3: Typical large server farm topology

Transition between server farm topologies are possible. Namely, starting with a small server farm and then transition into a medium or large server farm parallel to the growth of your company is possible. I will explain all the studies in this article series based on a medium server farm scenario. I mean, in an Active Directory environment (you can find the details about building an Active Directory environment in my earlier article  “Mail Infrastructure with Exchange Server 2010 (from scratch)” ), I will install one database server, one application server and one web front-end server. Then I will build and finish my Sharepoint infrastructure by using these servers.

The products that I selected for installation (as I mentioned before) are Windows Server 2008 R2 and MS SQL 2008 products. The following table is representing the servers’ name, IP numbers, operating systems and the installed products on them (Table 1):

Table 1: Summary of the servers

Before the installations, there are few points that I want to stress on:

-          The account that will perform the installations has to be administrator on the installation server

-          For each sharepoint services, a separate account has to be created

-          If Load Balanced server installation is planned (which I don’t), MOSS 2007 has to be on the same partition and installation directory

-          All the servers in the farm have to be installed with the same language pack (if language pack installation is performed)

-          All the servers in the farm have to be installed in the same language

-          For the servers which perform Indexing, Querying and Excel Calculations, a full installation must be selected during installation

Building the Sharepoint infrastructure can be divided into three phases:

Phase 1: Installation and configuration of servers

Phase 2: Creation and configuration of “Shared Services Provider”

Phase 3: Creation of Site Collection and Sharepoint Sites

So we can begin the preparations of Sharepoint Infrastructure. First of all, we have to create the user accounts for Sharepoint services in Active Directory (the details can be reached from the article Plan for administrative and service accounts (Office SharePoint Server) ). I create the accounts as follows:

spsql – SQL database server service account

spadm – installation account

spssp – shared services provider service account

spcrawl – default content access account

spapp – general application account

spsearch – Sharepoint Search service account

I will use all of these user accounts during the installation and configuration of Sharepoint infrastructure. I make all these user accounts the member of a group (called spgroup) before the installation and I also make this security group a member of local administrators group. Actually, this is not a good practice in security manner but I don’t want any problem during installation and configuration phases. After all the work is done, I will remove the spgroup from local administrators group and then I will give proper rights for the user accounts according to Microsoft article, Plan for administrative and service accounts (Office SharePoint Server) . There is one more thing that I want to mention about the user accounts: They have to have strong passwords and the passwords for these users will not be changed or will not expire.

In my medium farm scenario, I will install the database server first and create the database myself. I won’t create them by using the configuration wizard of Sharepoint Server. After that, I will only install the Sharepoint Server product but not configure it. After all the installations on servers are finished, I will run the configuration wizard for Sharepoint Server. This ends the first phase of the installation and configuration. The main job starts here (Phase 2 and Phase 3).

This is the first part of this article series. We talked about what Sharepoint is, what we need for the installation and configuration of Sharepoint Infrastructure. We also created the necessary user accounts in Active Directory. In second part we will install the database server. Bye for now.

Related Posts

1. Step by step installation of Sharepoint Server 2007 on Windows Server 2008 R2 and MS SQL 2008 – 3
2. Step by step installation of Sharepoint Server 2007 on Windows Server 2008 R2 and MS SQL 2008 – 2
3. Step by step installation of Sharepoint Server 2007 on Windows Server 2008 R2 and MS SQL 2008 – 4