1. Adding More Servers to the Farm
One of the great things about
SharePoint is its ability to scale. It is
easy to create some extremely flexible topologies with multiple
SharePoint servers. Obviously, before you can start scaling, you first
need to install SharePoint on those servers. That means following the
steps outlined in the earlier sections to run the prerequisite
installer, add the forgotten patches, and setting SharePoint up as you
did on your first server. It is completely safe to perform those steps
on all your servers at once.
After deploying all the necessary bits, you would
create the farm on one server only, keeping in mind that this server
will have Central Administration installed on it by default, and
therefore planning accordingly. With that step completed on the first
server, you are ready to add the other servers to the farm. Repeat the
following steps on all additional servers in your farm:
1. Remote
desktop to the server using a local admin account. It should be the
same account you used to do the first server. For this example, that is
Contoso\sp_install.
2. From the Start menu, run the SharePoint Products and Technology Configuration Wizard.
3. At the Welcome to SharePoint Products screen, click Next.
4. A dialog will appear warning you that some services will be stopped or restarted. Click Yes.
5. For the Connect to a server farm dialog, select “Connect to an existing server farm” and click Next.
6. For Database server: enter your SQL Server name and click Retrieve Database Names. In this example, the SQL server name is sql.
7. After a
moment the screen will refresh. In the drop-down database, select your
configuration database name. It should be SharePoint_Config unless you
changed it when creating your farm initially. Also, if you have
multiple databases listed, ensure that you choose the correct one.
Click Next.
8. In the Specify Farm Security Settings dialog, enter the passphrase you specified when creating the farm. For this example, use pass@word1. Click Next.
9. In the
Completing the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard dialog, click
Next to join the farm. The Advanced button is used for configuring this
server to also host the Central Administration website. If you are the
curious type, it is safe to click; and if you would like to have this
server host Central Administration, you can select the option. This
example assumes you do not.
10. When these steps are completed, click Finish to close the configuration wizard.
11. After a
moment Internet Explorer will open and take you to Central
Administration. Note that Central Administration is running on the
first server you provisioned. Close the window.
That’s it. At this point you would return to the
first server and continue building out your farm and following these
exact steps on all your additional servers. As mentioned earlier, it is
safe to run these steps on all the servers at the same time. Unlike
Black Friday shoppers, the servers will take orderly turns adding
themselves to the farm. If they could get you one of those fancy $99
TVs, life would be perfect.
2. Configuring the Farm
You have a farm but it isn’t very
helpful yet. You still need to configure the core services of
SharePoint. SharePoint provides these services through the service
application framework. CFor a deeper dive of how service applications work. Each
of the various services — such as Search, User Profiles, and Excel
Services, to name a few — are offered in an a la carte fashion. As you
create each service application, you can connect your various
SharePoint web applications to it to consume it. In this section, you
will do the initial configuration of the core service applications. You
will do this in a scalable fashion, in order to avoid some of the
goofiness that tries to sneak in along the way.
The following sections describe all the service
applications and outline the steps to create and configure each one.
While it is not necessary to create the service applications in the
following order, it is recommended because some of them automatically
register themselves with other service applications if they are
present, saving you extra configuration steps. Note that the service
applications appear in Central Administration in alphabetical order. In
addition, as you work through the list, some of the service
applications are considered “required” or “highly recommended,” while
others are optional. They are identified as such as you work through
the sections.
1. Make sure you are still on the first SharePoint server with Internet Explorer open logged in as your install account.
2. You should
see a pop-up dialog asking whether you want to Help Make SharePoint
Better. Make your selection and click OK. (You might be surprised to
know that the authors recommend you select Yes. Microsoft actively
monitors any feedback you provide and prioritizes fixes based in part
on this information — so if they are looking for problems to fix,
wouldn’t you like them to fix yours?)
3. From the Welcome dialog, choose, “No, I will configure everything myself,” by clicking Cancel.
Now you will find yourself at the home screen of
Central Administration. You can create most of the service applications
from here by clicking through and providing some basic information.
Unfortunately, some don’t work that way, such as the State Service and
the Usage and Health Data Collection Service. Never fear, however, as
where there is a will there is a way, and PowerShell is that way.
Before you do anything else, you need to open the SharePoint Management
Shell.
1. From the taskbar, click the SharePoint Management Shell link you created earlier.
Creating a Managed Account
Before continuing, you need to create a managed account.
This is an Active Directory (AD) account you register with SharePoint,
which you can use to run services and application pools. This enables
you to manage one account’s password in a central location from which
SharePoint can update all the places it is used in the farm. SharePoint
can even automatically change the password for you. It’s a great
feature, but it isn’t optional, so you have to follow along in this
section.
To get started you will need two AD accounts,
sp_serviceapp and sp_webapp. If you are creating these two accounts in
Active Directory, for now they just need to be domain users with no
special permissions at all.
1. Open Central Administration.
2. From the right-hand side of the page, click Security.
3. Under General Security, click Configure managed accounts.
4. From the
menu bar, click Register Managed Account. You may notice that sp_farm
is already registered. SharePoint did this for you automatically when
you made it the farm account.
5. In the Service account credentials section, enter Contoso\sp_serviceapp in the User name field if you are following the example. Remember to always add Domain\ in front of your account name.
6. For Password, enter your password. In the example, pass@word1 is used.
7. Ignore the other check boxes and click OK.
8. From the menu bar, click Register Managed Account.
9. In the Service account credentials section, enter Contoso\sp_webbapp if you are following the example. Remember to always add Domain\ in front of your username.
10. For Password, enter your password. In the example, pass@word1 is used.
11. Ignore the other check boxes and click OK.
Now you have three managed accounts registered, which you will be able to use as you continue configuring your farm.
Creating the Service Application App Pool
Each service application has a service
application proxy, which is really just a web service. Those proxies,
when created, have to run within an IIS application pool. By default in
SharePoint, all your service applications should run in the same
application pool unless there is a specific reason to otherwise handle
them.
When you create your first service application
using Central Administration, you can use that page to create an
application pool. Alternately, if you are the enterprising type, you
can create the app pool using the SharePoint Management Shell. To
simplify the instructions, use the following steps to create it using
PowerShell:
1. Open the SharePoint 2013 Management Shell.
2. Type the following and press Enter:
New-SPServiceApplicationPool -Name "Default SharePoint Service App Pool" -
Account contoso\sp_serviceapp
3. Confirm your work using the screen shown in Figure 3.
Provisioning the State Service
The State Service service application
is used to maintain state. This is one of those goofy .NET developer
things which is the equivalent of writing on your hand. It holds the
information temporarily while you use it and then it goes away. Some
people assume this isn’t necessary but even out-of-the-box features use
it so just go ahead and provision it to save looking up the error
messages later. Because there is no GUI to do you will be using the
SharePoint Management Shell.
1. At the prompt, type the following and press Enter:
New-SPStateServiceApplication -Name "State Service Application"
2. At the prompt, type the following and press Enter:
Get-SPStateServiceApplication| New-SPStateServiceApplicationProxy
-defaultproxygroup
3. At the prompt, type the following and press Enter:
Get-SPStateServiceApplication| New-SPStateServiceDatabase -Name
"State_Service_DB"
4. At the prompt, type the following and press Enter:
Get-spdatabase | where-object {$_.type -eq
"Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.StateDatabase"} |
initialize-spstateservicedatabase
5. Confirm your work using the screen shown in Figure 4.
Success. Now you have created the State Service application.
