SharePoint 2013 BI Farm Setup Guide: Section I. Overview

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

A. About this Guide

This guide specifies how to build a production-ready, multi-server SharePoint 2013 farm according to best practices. It includes detailed steps for planning, provisioning, installing and configuring SharePoint, SQL and Active Directory the way you would for a corporate intranet or extranet. Many details are included and very little is assumed; this guide does not leave you on your own to figure out how, for example, to set up your SQL server or how to configure policy objects in Group Policy Management.

1. About Section I

This section describes what this Guide is all about, what kind of SharePoint Farm you can build with this guide, and what makes this guide different than other guides available on the internet.  

Below are links to all the sections of this Guide.

I.     Overview II.    Plan Your SharePoint 2013 Enterprise Farm III.   Build a Virtual Network in Microsoft Azure IV.   Build the SQL Server for SharePoint Databases V.    Build the SharePoint Server VMs

VI.    Configure OUs and Group Policies VII.   Pre-Installation Requirements VIII.  Install SharePoint Prerequisites IX.    Install SharePoint 2013 with SP1 but Quit Before Running the Configuration Wizard X.   Configure the SharePoint Farm

XI.    Create the Baseline Web Applications and Site Collections XII.   Configure Search and MySites XIII.  Configure Office Web Apps XIV.  Configure Business Intelligence XV.   Turn Windows Firewalls Back On for All Servers XVI.  Download PowerShell Scripts

2. Key Features of this Process

Key features of the process specified in this guide are:

• On-premises equivalent using Azure Virtual Machines (IaaS)
• Production-quality scale and security
• Multi-server, three-tier architecture (5 SharePoint Servers; 2 SQL servers; 1 OWA server)
• Multi-farm PowerShell scripts designed for re-use: use the same scripts to build DEV, TEST, STAGE and PRODUCTION farms
• All PowerShell scripts included
• All PowerShell scripts do not contain any hard-coded names, passwords or URLs

3. SharePoint and BI Features Configured

This guide includes all the steps to build a SharePoint 2013 farm with all the most common, core SharePoint features configured according to best practices, plus a set of the most important Business Intelligence features. The following is a partial list:

• Home site collection
• Search
• User Profile Synchronization
• My Sites and People Search
• Managed Metadata Service
• Office Web Applications
• Secure Store Service
• Business Intelligence Center site collection
• SQL Server Report Server in SharePoint mode
• Excel Services
• PowerPivot for SharePoint

Through experience I have learned that Search and User Profile Synchronization are core features required in almost every SharePoint farm. Search and UPS are core features that can be challenging to get configured properly. Therefore it is a best practice – documented in this guide -- to get these core features working and stable before starting to configure other features such as BI, App Catalog and Workflow. 

4. PowerShell Scripts

This methodology relies heavily on PowerShell scripts, and this guide includes a library of PowerShell scripts free for you to adapt and use. These PowerShell scripts are specifically designed for creating multiple SharePoint 2013 farms. Experience has shown that use of PowerShell scripts can improve the repeatability and reliability of the process. The scripts included with this guide are tested, commented and specifically designed so that you can use the same scripts unmodified to build a set of SharePoint farms -- e.g. DEV, TEST, STAGE and PRODUCTION -- all following the same, consistent procedure. We developed this because we found that most enterprise deployments of SharePoint require a “pipeline” of SharePoint farms to support a disciplined “DevOps” process (dev --> test --> stage --> production).

The following OneDrive public folder contains read-only copies of all the PowerShell scripts free for you to download and adapt:

MBP Farm PowerShell Scripts

Section IV details the steps for you to create a scripts folder on the first server in your farm, copy the scripts into that folder, and prepare them for use in your environment. 

B. Microsoft Azure IaaS

This guide includes step-by-step instructions to build a multi-server SharePoint farm using Microsoft Azure virtual machines and virtual networks. This choice of Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) makes it very easy for anyone following this guide to build a multi-server farm without buying hardware, however, all other aspects of this guide are independent of this choice. All other parts of this guidance are valid and accurate regardless of whether you use Azure, your own physical servers, or virtual machines in a different cloud provider. 

Following this guide you can build your very own multi-server SharePoint farm without buying any server hardware and without trying to squeeze four Virtual Machines into your desktop computer using Hyper-V or VMWare.  All you need is a browser, an internet connection, and either an MSDN subscription or a credit card (or both).

Azure IaaS is very convenient because in one afternoon you can build a whole network, domain, domain controller and half dozen servers to your specifications running the latest version of windows. This approach uses the cloud as a virtual data center. This approach maps very closely to provisioning an on-premises infrastructure of servers running on physical hardware in your data center. Feel free to adapt these procedures to fit your environment if, for example, your configuration uses physical hardware in an on-premises data center. This guide is less useful for Office 365 or SharePoint Online environments.

While you may follow this guide to build a small test farm if that is your goal, the primary objective of this guild is to build a life-size, production-ready three-tier SharePoint farm. You may adapt this guide to your needs, but the example farm (MBP) configured in this guide consists of five SharePoint servers, one SQL database server for SharePoint data, one SSAS server for BI, one Office Web Apps server and one Active Directory/Domain Controller. This example farm can easily be scaled out to a larger farm, for example, by adding additional Web Front End servers, a Workflow server and/or a Cloud App server.

C. MBP Stands for Martin's Best Practices

This guide uses “MBP” as the acronym to distinguish domain names, machine names and environment variables that are specific to this guide and process. MBP in this context stands for “Martin’s Best Practice”. You may easily do a search and replace in this guide (and in the scripts) for MBP and replace it with a specific company or project name or acronym to fit your project, as needed. 

D. Acknowledgements

This guide draws heavily on the wisdom of SharePoint MVPs and Neudesic consultants. Specifically,

• Todd Klindt, MVP (http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/) and
• Dan Holm, MVP (http://tiny.cc/danholmespc2012)).

Many thanks also to the following Neudesic consultants:

• Hemant Joshi - for assistance on many of the PowerShell scripts
• Mark Grossbard - for peer review and comments
• Marcus Crast - for the Azure tricks and Business Intelligence steps
• Eric Stoltz - for best practices involving Group Policy Objects
• Aaron Carpenter – for guidance on about remote PowerShell

Next Steps

This is section provided an overview of the SharePoint 2013 BI Farm Setup Guide. Next, Section II describes how to plan your SharePoint 2013 farm, including detailed tables and diagrams illustrating the MBP farm as an example.

The Journey from On-Premises to Hybrid and Cloud

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, at Microsoft Ignite in Chicago last week, said, "Every company is a software company." What he meant was that every company must enhance collaboration and increase productivity at the same time, together. No easy task.

Why? Because today just about every company in the world is experiencing the fusion of collaboration (voice, chat, meetings) with productivity (business applications, workflow, and business intelligence). Each company is unique in the details of their business process and in the nature of their collaboration. Each company, therefore, needs a unique combination of software and platform, of cloud and on-premises, of custom and out-of-the-box.

Rich are the rewards to those who find a workable balance, an effective path as they maintain the known, stable on-premises systems and solutions that have worked so well for so long, on the one hand and the new, fast-changing "intelligent cloud" -- the infrastructure that powers mobility -- on the other.

At Microsoft Ignite in Chicago last week I came to fully appreciate that 80% of companies' IT infrastructure is "hybrid" and will be for at least the next 10 years.

I immediately recognized the challenges and opportunities this picture presents. The whole conference seemed to arrive at the understanding that "hybrid" is not a transition, it is not a temporary state you pass through on your way to cloud nirvana. Hybrid is the way it is now and the way it's going to be for a long, long time. So I gave myself the project -- during my five days and nights in Chicago -- of finding out what the road map looks like for companies and IT departments starting the journey into the hybrid world of cloud and on-premises together, of collaboration and productivity together.

The details of this journey from on-premises to hybrid and cloud are starting to emerge from my experiences helping customers migrate to Office 365, from breakout sessions at Ignite, and from my conversations with clients, IT professionals, and MVPs. The road map of this journey looks like this:

• The journey actually started a several years ago with salesforce.com and accelerated when uses started using box.com and dropbox, often without the knowledge or approval of IT. 
• The next step, very often, is Azure Active Directory, the foundation for Exchange Online and Office 365.
• Synchronization between on-premises Active Directory and Azure Active Directory establishes your foothold in the cloud. It makes single sign-on possible.
• Exchange online is typically the next step and the first of the previously on-premises platforms to be migrated to the cloud. The business case is strongest because risk is small and E-mail is like plumbing: a foundation with little customization
• Midway into the cloud, many customers start using Office 365. Few though, can go 100% to SharePoint online right away because legacy investments in SharePoint on-premises solutions (full trust code) take time to rewrite.
• OneDrive, Yammer, Power BI, and Delve start to deliver huge value to the organization. All four applications are cloud-only.
• Around this point in the journey, MySites can be migrated to Office 365 to great benefit. Often MySites are easier to migrate than SharePoint project sites and customized sites because MySites typically have little or no customizations. 
• Enterprise Search is a huge workload that, while very advantageous to move to the cloud, can require a lot of work to move. Infrastructure headaches with on-premises Search make this a compelling step, but there are multiple technical challenges to ensure your cloud-based search can securely crawl the on-premises content you cannot migrate to the cloud.
• Team sites and sites with little or no branding or customization can be migrated to the cloud with benefits for the mobile and global workers. 
• Late in the game -- deep into the hybrid/cloud journey -- come the migrations of complex, mission-critical custom applications developed using SharePoint full-trust code. These solutions require a complete re-write into the new Cloud App Model (SharePoint-hosted apps and Provider-hosted apps). While all new SharePoint custom development should be designed to conform to the Cloud App Model, legacy SharePoint solutions will have to be replaced or re-written before organizations can get rid of their last on-premises SharePoint server.

This journey through the hybrid cloud is ripe with challenges and will require constant re-evaluation. My mission, my passion, is to help my clients with the journey through the hybrid cloud, to create business solutions that address these challenges, to bring collaboration and productivity together in a world where users make their own choices -- with their own devices -- while IT professionals exert just enough governance and control to keep the enterprise secure.