SharePoint 2013: Configure a Basic SharePoint Farm

Article
1/17/2024

Introduction

It’s the first time that you are installing and configuring SharePoint 2013, and you wonder “How do I configure my SharePoint farm?”

For most production installations, there is a lot of planning that needs to happen before beginning to configure a farm. For example:

Planning Managed Accounts for the Service Applications
Deciding on friendly names for databases (SharePoint assigns names with GUIDs by default)
How many servers will be in the farm?
What service applications will be configured on which servers
And lots of other planning…

For the sake of simplicity, let’s take the example of a Junior SharePoint administrator, installing SharePoint for the first time, using the Farm Configuration Wizard. Go ahead and click on “Yes, walk me through the configuration on my farm using this wizard”..

Running the Farm Configuration Wizard

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It will ask you to create a new managed account or to create a new managed account. Most of us, and I am not afraid to say it, are using the farm administrator as account for creating the service applications.
This IS NOT a best practice. Why?

Not all services needs Admin rights
Admin rights means : great security issue
…

But, this is well a “good manner” for

Avoid “Access Denied”
Avoid to see which service needs which account
…

Let’s say that we are using the Administrator Account …

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It will ask you to choose with service to create and start. Please select all of them or only one you need.

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Depending what you are selecting, it will take time for installing and configuring your services.
I selected everything and on a VM with 4gig RAM and i5 processor it takes 15 minutes.. (I know my VM is very slow :-) )

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When SharePoint finishes creating Service Applications, it will ask you to select a Web Site Address and to choose a Site Template .

There are many new templates, but if you want to use only the templates from 2010, because you are addicted to the 2010 like me, you have to change “2013” to “2010” and choose your template..

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When SharePoint has all his info, he will create you a site and show up a summary.

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You can navigate to your website and made all the modification that you want

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Horrible Database Names

But again, when you are connecting to my SQL Server, you will see all your databases and, yeah it’s not sexy to see. You will have on each database a GUID.

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Service Application Considerations

Also be careful when you create a new Web Application, SharePoint will standardly associate all the Service applications to your Web applications.
It will be nonsense to associate all the services if you create a Search Center.

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Conclusion

So the conclusion is to select “NO” when SharePoint asks to create your services.
WHY?

Managed Accounts
Rights
Database Names
Associations

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