Here it goes, my first installation of SharePoint 2013…

A little precursor about my environment

  1. I have a custom build “desktop” machine that is running a 4-core i7 HT processor, 24 GB of RAM and a 2TB Raid 1+0 array
  2. I’m running Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V to host all my virtual machines, this includes a 4 core, 7 GB SQL 2012 VM. When setting this up for SharePoint 2010 I named all my databases with SP2010_DatabaseName, so for this case I’m going to use the same SQL Instance as it will be easy to tell which databases are from SP2013
  3. I also have a virtual AD Server running Windows Server 2008 R2
  4. I built a brand new 2 core, 5 GB VM running Windows Server 2008 R2 for SharePoint 2013, fully patched it and added it to my domain.

The Installation

  1. I downloaded the SharePoint 2013 bits (the .img file) and proceeded to extract it with WinRAR (WinRAR doesn’t recognize the .img file but you can still open WinRAR, browse the to file and WinRAR will open and extract it)
  2. Open the files and click default (the file launched by autorun
  3. Install software prerequisites
  4. Accept the license terms and click next
  5. Away it goes
  6. You may need a restart during the pre-req installer
  7. Click finish and the server will automatically be rebooted and the pre-req installer will resume upon logging back into the server. My pre-req installer finished without any issues or errors.
  8. Click Install SharePoint Server back in the main SharePoint launch dialog, upon clicking it the first time I got an error that it couldn’t proceed due to a pending restart. Easy enough to handle, a restart it is. Re-launched “Default” from the media and “Install SharePoint Server” and away it went.
  9. I don’t think the product key matters since it’s free, but just in case Microsoft is sending out a unique one to everyone.
  10. ALWAYS choose complete
  11. While SharePoint 2013 was installing, I also made sure I had my SQL Alias set up, another “always do this” task.
  12. I always uncheck the “Run the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard now”, for this install however, I’ll leave it checked just to get SharePoint running. I’ll try to write another blog post later showing where to go from here if you don’t want to use the Configuration Wizard.
  13. The configuration ran for about 10 seconds before I got an error about the SQL Server instance not having a “max degree of parallelism” setting of 1. This is a document requirement that I had forgotten about. If you have the same issue, go into SQL, delete your SharePoint 2013 Configuration database and then restart the configuration wizard. You need to select “create a new farm” and start over. You can’t recover from this error and restart your configuration wizard where it failed.
  14. And the GUIDs are back…definitely an upcoming post on SharePoint 2013 Installation/Configuration without any GUIDs (assuming it’s possible)

And there you have it, SharePoint 2013!