Now that the Domain Controller along with Active Directory and DNS is implemented we can move on to the SharePoint servers.  As I had stated before, this environment will be a full MinRole farm.  It won’t be a high availability farm, though I will likely build that out in a future set of posts.  The SharePoint component of this environment will consist of a single web front end, application server, search server, and distributed cache server.  In this post, we will prepare the servers before creating the configuration file for SharePoint 2019.

This is a multi-part series.  You can see what is coming and review other posts in the series by clicking one of the following links:

Build SharePoint Web Front End

You can add the SharePoint server via the Azure admin console either from the “Create a resource” button, from your resource group, from all resources listing… ok let’s be honest.  Like SharePoint, there are many ways to do the same thing.  I’ll describe this from the Virtual Machine menu.

  1. Login to Azure (https://portal.azure.com)
  2. Click on Virtual Machines from the left-hand menu
  3. Click Add

Building a SharePoint 2019 MinRole Environment in Microsoft Azure - Build SharePoint Servers - Create SharePoint VM

I’ll highlight some of the key settings for the different components of the VM.  If there is a menu item I don’t mention, keep the default.

Basics

  • Resource Group: The resource group you have been creating the SharePoint components under
  • Server Name: Meaningful name for your server within the environment (ex: drevAzureSP-WFE)
  • Image: Windows Server 2019 Datacenter.
  • Size: I leave this to you to decide.  Though I do suggest you put in a server with multiple CPUs (required) and at least 12GB of ram.  This is a dev environment, but you still want it usable.  I went with the B4ms (4 CPUs, 16GB ram).  It is $176 (CAD) a month, but it’s not always going to be running.
  • Username, Password: Enter the local admin username and password you want for the server
  • Inbound Port Rules: Allow for RDP.  We’ll remove this later once we have the express route configured.

Disks

  • OS Disk Type: to save cost on disks because you are always paying for their cost (can’t be deallocated) I recommend Standard SSD or Standard HDD because this is for a dev environment.  If this was to be used for production, definitely select Premium SSD.
  • Data Disks: To cut costs, you can utilize the OS disk for the SharePoint install.  I do not recommend this for production environments, but it will work for our needs.

Networking

  • Utilize the defaults here.  You shouldn’t need to change anything.

Management

  • Diagnostics storage account: Select the storage account you created for this VM (or create one now if you didn’t do this before).
    • Name: Meaningful name for the account
    • Account kind: Storage (general purpose v1)
    • Performance: Standard
    • Replication: Locally-redundant storage (LRS)
  • Auto-Shutdown: On
  • Shutdown Time: Select a time that works for you
  • Time zone: Select the time zone you are in (or where the bulk of the work will be done from)
  • Notification before shutdown: Your choice.

Advanced

Nothing to change here.

Tags

Select any tags for your environment you require

Review + Create

Review the items you selected on this page.  Ensure everything you need is there.

Next, you can either join the server to the domain (see previous post) or you can create the next three servers.  To create these servers follow this post to build the VMs and name them accordingly.  Remember you need to create an App Server, a Search Server, and a Distributed Cache Server.

Thanks for reading!