SharePoint 2010: Farm Configuration Wizard

Before we get started. One thing you should know there are no more SSP’s in SharePoint 2010. Instead there are Services (many of them), the “SSP” is replaced by the “Search Service Application”. To find out more about services check out the “Services in SharePoint 2010” poster from Microsoft:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263199.aspx it’s really informative.

I am logged on to LAB-INDX as PINTOLAKE\Service-SharePoint. LAB-INDX is one of the servers where Central Administration is located, to avoid double hops. I will configure the farm directly on the server which hosts Central Administration

Open “SharePoint 2010 Central Administration” from the “Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products” under All Programs

If you are prompted to “Help Make SharePoint Better” pick your option – If you let Central Administration open then closed the window while adding the other servers to the farm then you might not see this window.

Press OK

If you are prompted to “Start the Wizard” click it. If you let Central Administration open then closed the window while adding the other servers to the farm then you might not see this window but you can get to the wizard by the directions in the next step

If you are not already in the wizard, Select “Configuration Wizards” from the menu on the left side

Select “Farm Configuration – Launch the Farm Configuration Wizard”

Select “Start the Wizard”

Select the services you want to enable on your farm. You can associate services a la cart to web applications now. I selected 6 services which I will most probably use in a lot of future installations

Noticeable ones worked over from SharePoint 2007 include:

• Search Service Application – replaces the old SSP
• User Profile Service Application – for My Sites

Press “Next”

SharePoint will process your request

Now this kind of bugs me. We are going to skip this step. This is to create a site collection in the default web application. In most installation I perform, I create a new web application with a host header, because most WFE’s are load balanced. This is trying to create a site collection using my indexing server as the URL, we can fiddle with Defining Managed Paths however I like to start fresh with a new Web Application.

We will skip this and delete the default web application a little later on, when we create a new web application for the Load Balanced Web Front Ends

Click Finish

We are now ready to create a mirror of our Index, on to the next article in the series.