A recent visit I made to install SharePoint for a production extranet reminded me of the importance to plan ahead and make sure that the prerequisites for successful installation and operation are in place before a visit. The big difference between development and production is the flexibility of the environment and the control you have over it. I would suggest this is the case because things like change control don’t necessarily exist (at least formally) on your Virtual PC environment that sits on your laptop on which you have local administrator rights!
It is also easy to take for granted that a server will have internet access, or to take for granted that the local machine you are using to Remote Desktop to the production environment has a high speed network link. You are reminded how important planning ahead is when you have to wait for several hundred megabytes of install media and service packs to trickle over a slow management link, while you watch the progress meter guessing how many hours you have to wait.
So I brought together my notes to get a quick shortlist of the things to have in place before a successful site visit:
- Install Media – now that virtualisation is so prevalent, iso images are very easy to mount against a virtual machine. The thing to remember to do is to get the iso image over to the production environment in advance of the install. In our case we brought the files together on the web front-end (WFE) machine.
- Product Key – you don’t get very far before you need to enter that product key for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, so have it handy for when you start the install.
- .NET Framework Redistributable Packages – you need .NET Framework 2.0 and .NET Framework 3.0 for a successful installation, and make sure you get the full distributable for the correct platform (x86 or x64) and not the bootstrapper. Get the bootstrapper for either will lead to disappointment when you discover you cannot download the rest of the components on your production server.
- Service Packs etc – there are several important service packs that should be in place – check with those that manage your windows server platform. But, in summary, remember to be up to date with Windows Server, SharePoint 2007 SP1 and after, and the appropriate .NET service packs. And in the case with our install, that means having the appropriate redistributable files copied to the correct place.
- Parameters for outbound email – if you are using email alerts etc then you will need the name or ip address of an smtp server to relay messages through, something you may need to prearrange with whoever owns the relay. There are also the sender and reply-to email addresses to have to hand.
- Port Numbers – this is important for a production environment where you cannot assume that there will be routing between the machines or that ports will be open for inter-server communication. Change control to get ports opened in firewalls can take some time, so it does well to establish at planning stage which services will be used. To install SharePoint with a separate SQL Server database connected to over tcp/ip will require a port to be opened, normally 1433. If you plan on restoring or making backups, then you will need to open ports to allow the WFE and SQL Server servers to access the backup files. For file share you need UDP ports from 135 to 139 and TCP ports from 135 to 139, or for direct hosted SMB without netbios you need port 445 (both TCP and UDP). If you plan to use outgoing email then you need to open the port for SMTP, which is by default port 25. This also assumes that routing is in place for your users to connect to the WFE, to allow server management, and routing for Active Directory.
Note that the notes do not incorporate any idea of the order of events, which should be obvious but may be the matter of another post.