Thursday, July 16, 2015

SharePoint 2013 BI Farm Setup Guide: Section VIII. Install SharePoint Prerequisites

This is section VIII of the MBP SharePoint 2013 BI Farm Setup Guide. 

This section describes how to run the SharePoint Prerequisite Installer.

As mentioned in Section I, in this guide, MBP stands for "Martin's Best Practices."  I use MBP as the acronym for the enterprise, the domain and also the name of the farm. MBP does not correspond to any actual company or client. You may leverage this content by replacing MBP with your client or company name or acronym.

A. Download SharePoint Server 2013 with SP1


 Download the SharePoint Server 2013 with SP1 ISO file from MSDN to the Installs folder you created on the F: (data) drive of the Central Admin server (MBP-CA).

Make sure you have the license key.

B. Install SharePoint Server Prerequisites

The combination of installing SharePoint Server 2013 with SP1 on a Windows Server 2012 R2 server has eliminated the need for any hotfixes or updates as was required when installing on Windows Server 2008 R2 or SharePoint without SP1.

We therefore proceed directly to installing the SharePoint Server 2013 Prerequisites:

1. If you are not logged in to the server that will become the SharePoint Central Admin VM (MBP-CA), open a remote desktop connection to that server and login using the SharePoint Setup Account - mbp\sp_admin in this case.

2. Open windows explorer and navigate to the folder where you downloaded the SharePoint 2013 Server with SP1 ISO file (F:\installs in this case).

3. Right-mouse-click on the ISO file and select Mount to mount the ISO file so it looks like a DVD drive to Windows.




Windows displays the contents of the DVD drive.

4. Scroll down and launch prerequisiteinstaller


5. At the UAC prompt, click Yes

 6. In the Welcome screen, click Next>

7. Accept the license agreement and click Next>

The Prerequisite Installer runs

The Prerequisite Installer may need 15-20 minutes to run.

8. When the Prerequisite installer displays, “Your system needs to restart…” click Finish.


9. When your VM has restarted, open MBP-CA.rdp to connect back to the VM and login using the SharePoint Setup Account - mbp\sp_admin

10. Windows may display the error message, “E:\prerequisiteinstaller.exe The system cannot find the drive specified.”

If this happens it is because you mounted the ISO as E: drive and the restart un-mounted that drive. In this case

a. Carefully note the start command that Windows was trying to run when it encountered this error. Then click OK to close the error.

b. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the folder with the SharePoint 2013 Server with SP1 ISO file (F:\installs, in this case).

c. Mount the ISO file so it looks like a DVD drive to Windows.

d. Open a command prompt using Run As Administrator

e. Type in the command that windows was trying to run that previously caused the error:
C:\Users\sp_admin>start "Launch SharePoint preparation tool" "E:\prerequisiteinstaller.exe" /continue

The prerequisite installer continues to run

 11. If the prerequisite installer prompts to restart the system again, click Finish

 12. When your VM has restarted, connect to the VM using mbp\sp_admin

13. If you get the same error message, “E:\prerequisiteinstaller.exe The system cannot find the drive specified” just repeat step 10 above. The prerequisite installer continues to run.

14. When the prerequisite installer displays, “Installation Complete”, click Finish.


15. Repeat this process to run prerequisiteinstaller.exe to completion on every computer that will be a SharePoint server.

You may find it convenient to share the F:\installers folder on the first SharePoint server so it’s faster to copy the ISO file to the other SharePoint servers.

C.     Disable Loopback on all Web Front Ends and CA

Loopback check is an IIS security feature that is designed to help prevent reflection attacks on your computer.

You need to disable Loopback check in order to run a browser locally on the server and open pages hosted by that server. If you skip this step and then if you remote desktop and login directly to a Web Front End server, then launch IE and try to open the SharePoint site that that server is hosting, it will simply time out without displaying the page. For background explanation see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861.
UPDATE 7/15/2015: Method 1 is not working in Azure VMs. Use Method 2.

There are two different procedures for disabling loopback: Method 1 or Method 2. The method you should use depends on whether you are disabling loopback on a PRODUCTION server (in which case you should use Method 1) or you are disabling loopback on a DEV or TEST server (in which case you may use Method 2).

Reboot the server after making changes to the registry.

1. Method 1


Method 1 is described here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861. Use method 1 for greater security on servers in a PRODUCTION farm.

1) Follow the following steps to set the DisableStrictNameChecking registry entry to 1:

a) Search --> regedit then click regedit

b) In Registry Editor, locate and then click on the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters

c) On the Edit menu, click New --> DWORD (32-bit) Value


d) Add the following registry value:

Value name: DisableStrictNameChecking
Data type: REG_DWORD
Radix: Decimal
Value: 1

e) OK



2) Follow the following steps to insert the host names of all the Web Applications that will be hosted on this server into the BackConnectionHostNames registry entry:

a) In Registry Editor, locate and then click on the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\MSV1_0

b) Right-click MSV1_0 point to New, and then click Multi-String Value/

c) Type BackConnectionHostNames and then press ENTER.

d) Right-click BackConnectionHostNames and then click Modify...

e) In the Value data box, type the host name or the host names for the sites that are on the local computer, one on each line.

In the case of the MBP farm we need these the following host names on both WFE servers (MBP-WFE1 and MBP-WFE2):

· home.mbp.com

· mysite.mbp.com

· bi.mbp.com


On the Central Admin server (MBP-CA), we need

· mbp-ca

f) Click OK

NOTE: Regedit displays “Warning: Data of type REG-MULTI_SZ” cannot contain empty strings….”. Click OK.

g) Quit the Registry Editor

2. Method 2



Method 2 is described here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861. Use method 2 for simplicity on DEV and TEST Web Front End servers.   

1. Follow the following steps to set the DisableLoopbackCheck registry key to 1:

a. Start --> run, type regedit then click OK

b. In Registry Editor, locate and then click on the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa

c. Right-click on Lsa, point to New, and then click DWORD Value

d. Type DisableLoopbackCheck, and then click Modify.

e. In the Value data box, type 1 and then click OK

f. Quit the Registry Editor

Remember to reboot the server after making changes to the registry, regardless of whether you used Method 1 or Method 2.

Next Steps

This concludes section VIII of the MBP SharePoint 2013 BI Farm Setup Guide. In this section we ran the SharePoint Prerequisites installer and performed a few configuration steps required before starting the installation of SharePoint. 

In the next section (section IX) we install SharePoint by running the Setup program.
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