We come to the fourth and final post in my series on deploying a SharePoint 2019 Development Environment.  In this post, we will install SharePoint 2019 with AutoSPInstaller.  AutoSPInstaller is a great tool that allows you to set all the configuration of your environment from an easy to use GUI.  It then exports your settings as a config file for a batch process that will install and configure your entire SharePoint environment from installing the binaries to configuring your site collections.  It’s a far cry from sitting at an install screen waiting for everything to finish and then having to configure it again for the next server.  Setting up the config file may take some time, but it will benefit in the end because it will install all of your servers for you.

If you are interested in checking out the other items in this series click on the links below:

Building the AutoSPInstaller Configuration File

As I stated above, this is going to take some time.  It will likely take the most time of this entire process.  But bear with me.  If you are installing a lot of servers (this process I am covering can be fully adapted for production install too) this will save you time in the long run.

  1. Navigate to https://autospinstaller.com/
  2. Click on Build a Farm

Install SharePoint 2019 with AutoSPInstaller - Build A Farm

  1. Next click on “Begin with a template”.  This will load a very generic template that you can modify for your needs.
  2. Next enter the host names of the SharePoint servers in your farm.  If you are only building a single server farm you should not enter anything here.  You will receive an error.

Install SharePoint 2019 with AutoSPInstaller - Enter Server Host Names

  1. Click on Install along the Navigation menu (left side) to move onto the next step.

Install Section

  1. Name: Default is Dev.  You can change this as you please.  Because I am running multiple Dev environments I renamed mine to SP2019_Dev
  2. Offline Install: Indicate if you have already prepared the files required for install.  Since we did this in the previous post, we will place check here.
  3. Pause After Install: This will stop the script from continuing while the other servers have their binaries installed.  Check this if you are installing multiple servers at the same time.  In this case, we are going to NOT check it because we are going to enable the next option.
  4. Remote Install: Selecting this will allow the script to install SharePoint on all of the servers you entered in the Host Name section.  Ensure you setup your servers for remote installation (steps in the previous post).
  5. Parallel Install: Only enable this if your servers aren’t hosted together.  For the sake of this post we will not be selecting it as the slow down caused by multiple installs on the same hard drive will be worse than waiting for the two servers to complete in sequence.
  6. Auto Logon: Check this option, but do not fill in the password (you will be prompted during the install).  This allows the script to login on your behalf for any reboots.
  7. Don’t make any changes to the options in the Disable Components section.
  8. Config File: Enter the name of the config file.  It will be created by AutoSPInstaller and automatically prepped in the script.
  9. Install Directory: Location where SharePoint should be installed to.  Make sure the location exists for all servers.
  10. Data Directory: Where data components (like search index) are stored.  Make sure the location exists for all servers.
  11. SKU: Are you installing Standard Server or Enterprise
  12. Pid Key: The license key for the install.

Install SharePoint 2019 with AutoSPInstaller - AutoSPInstaller Install Options

Main

  1. Farm Passphrase: Enter the passphrase needed to join servers to the farm.
  2. Leave the admin checkmarks as they are (we want it as admin for the configuration, but don’t want to leave it there).
  3. Enter the username and password of the farm account
  4. Make sure the Create Alias option is checked and enter your alias name.
  5. Database Server Instance: The instance you built when you created your SQL Server.
  6. Database Server Port: Port your instance is running on.
  7. Database Prefix: As it reads, how you would like the databases prefixed for databases in this server.  You can leave it blank, but it makes it easier if your server is shared.
  8. Central Administration: I would suggest you provision on both.  I have actually had a server’s CA connection break and had to flip over to the other server to configure the farm.
  9. You can change the port if you want, but if it is a dev environment you can just leave it the same.
  10. Finally, enter your cache and managed accounts as well as the passwords.

Install SharePoint 2019 with AutoSPInstaller - Farm Options

 

Services

Set all options on this page to “Do not Provision”.  You can actually leave it the way it is because we are setting the next screen up as a MinRole and it overrides the settings on this page.  I just choose to disable to be on the safe side.

MinRoles

Here we can select the roles of our farm servers.  Because I am deploying 2 servers to the farm I can able to do a MinRole farm.  My WFE server will have the role: Front-end With Distributed Cache and the APP server will have the role: Application with Search

Install SharePoint 2019 with AutoSPInstaller - Min Role Options

Logging

Make sure you are compressing your logs (three checkmarks).  The only item I would suggest changing is the ULS Log locations.  I would leave everything else as default for a DEV environment.

Install SharePoint 2019 with AutoSPInstaller - Logging Options

Web Applications

AutoSPInstaller builds out two web applications for you by default.  The Portal (your main SharePoint site) and MySite Host.  One thing to note.  I don’t intend to use Host Named Site Collections off of my Portal web application, but I am still going to leave the host header option blank.  You never know what can happen.

Install SharePoint 2019 with AutoSPInstaller - Portal Web App

You will find the application pool is already selected for you.  You can change some of the default settings (I recommend you at least change the App Pool Name and URL).  You can also set up any managed paths here you wish.  I am going to be adding a path for application development and search right now (sites are created for you automatically).

Install SharePoint 2019 with AutoSPInstaller - Managed Paths

AutoSPInstaller creates a single site collection by default for you.  I modified this one to the root URL I created for the web application, added my username as the owner, modified the searc centre URL and provided a name for the content database.

I created one more site collection to be used for the search centre.

Install SharePoint 2019 with AutoSPInstaller - Root Site Collection     Install SharePoint 2019 with AutoSPInstaller - Search Site Collection

The MySite Web Application I left pretty much default except modified the URLs (web app and site collection) and AppPool name.

Install SharePoint 2019 with AutoSPInstaller - My Site Config

Service Applications

Because we are deploying MinRole servers for this installation we can ignore setting specific servers to run the service apps on.  We’ll just concentrate on the options for each.

  1. Managed Metadata:
    • Modify the names as you see fit (or leave at default)
  2. User Profile Services
    • Modify the names as you see fit (or leave at default)
    • Leave My Site Host Location blank as we are creating a Web App for that specifically
    • My Site Managed Path should point at the wildcard path you added to your MySite Web App.
  3. Usage and Health
    • Modify the names as you see fit (or leave at default)
  4. State Service
    • Modify the names as you see fit (or leave at default)
  5. Search Service
    •  Enter your contact information for messages in the search service.  If search functionality fails the system will email you.
    • If you don’t want to use the default location for your index update it in the Custom Index Location field.
    • Proxy Type: for a dev environment I recommend Reduced.  You really don’t need a lot of threads running for search in a dev environment.
    • Enter the crawl account name and password.  Make sure you don’t use the same account running the service.  Use an account specifically for crawling data.
    • You can modify the rest of the options, but for my dev environment, I left the rest at the default.
  6. Secure Store
    • Modify the names as you see fit (or leave at default)
  7. Business Data Connectivity
    • In the past, I have deployed this service, but I haven’t worked on a BCS solution in quite some time so I advise to leave it for now and deploy it later if you need it.
  8. App Management
    • I left most of this default, except modified the URL to match the domain I was using.
  9. Subscription Service
    • Modify the names as you see fit (or leave at default)
  10. Machine Translation Service
    • Modify the names as you see fit (or leave at default)
  11. PowerPoint Conversion Service
    • Modify the names as you see fit (or leave at default)

Enterprise Service Apps

You can choose to deploy these services if you are planning on using them, but for the purpose of this environment, I won’t be.

Project Server

I won’t be installing Project Server at this time.  We’ll leave that for another post.  I recommend that it doesn’t get installed at this point. If something goes wrong with the installation and you installed them both at the same time, determining the cause might be more difficult.  However, installing SharePoint and ensuring it is working before Project Server could make any troubleshooting easier.

Review and Download

The AutoSPInstaller site doesn’t have a save file functionality.  Just click on the Review and Download link and copy the data from the text box into a text editor app and save the file as an AutoSPInstaller config file (AutoSPInstallerInput-SRV-SP2019APP.xml).

Next, we move on to the actual install.

Install SharePoint 2019 with AutoSPInstaller

Download the latest version of AutoSPInstaller from https://github.com/brianlala/AutoSPInstaller.  Extract it into your servers (for the purpose of this post I have saved it to C:\SPInstall.  Next, copy the 2019 and Automation folder from AutoSPInstaller extract into the SPInstall folder.  Next copy the SharePoint folder from the AutoSPBuilder setup into the 2019 folder.  Once that is done copy the Updates folder (if you downloaded CU patches) into the 2019\Updates folder.  When this is all done copy the C:\SPInstall folder from your App server to your WFE server.  On the WFE server rename the config file to the name of your WFE server (AutoSPInstallerInput-SRV-SP2019WFE.xml)

In previous versions of AutoSPInstaller and SharePoint you had to use an UNC path to launch.  I couldn’t find any confirmation if this was still required or not, but I figured the time required to launch this way wasn’t a big deal.  I shared the SharePoint folders to everyone and launched AutoSPInstaller by running the following command:

\\srv-sp2019APP\c$\SPInstall\Automation\AutoSPInstallerLaunch.bat

AutoSPInstaller is supposed to map your IP Addresses for you.  It didn’t for me so you can use this script to create your IP Address mapping:

ac -Encoding UTF8  C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts "192.168.0.125   drevsp2019.com"
ac -Encoding UTF8  C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts "192.168.0.125   mysites.drevsp2019.com"

And that’s it.  You can now start utlizing your new Dev environment

Preparing Servers for SharePoint 2019 - Central Admin           Preparing Servers for SharePoint 2019 - SP2019 Welcome

Thanks for reading!