Automated or Silent or Unattended MOSS farm Installation and Configuration

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As an Ops person, one of the things that excites me is automation and being able to use technology to make my life easier. At the MS Sharepoint Conference, Ben Curry from Mindsharp gave a great presentation on how to perform an automated install of a MOSS farm using psconfig and stsadm commands. I haven't had a chance to try and tweak it for my work environment, however from what I saw, it was fantastic! Here is a template of how my current team has been approaching this silent or unattended MOSS installation.

Below is a list of the different Areas to focus on:

1. Operating System:

  • Use an image build to install the OS
  • Create some scripts (i.e. we use .vbs, .bat, or .cmd files) to configure the OS to follow your groups best practices (i.e. recyclebin, pagefile, autoupdate or antivirus settings). We were lucky to have some great developers to put this together for us, however if you don't have the teammates who can script or code, check out the library of existing scripts in Scriptcenter on Technet.

2. MOSS Prerequisites:

  • Create some scripts to install .net 2.0, .net 3.0. 
  • Also create some scripts to configure and install IIS. For example, adding in MIME types or enabling web extensions

3. Install MOSS and create Farm:

  • Here is where we are going to look to leverage Ben Curry's automation scripts. They could be found on https://www.mindsharp.com under Premium Content.
  • His scripts include how to do an automated install of the MOSS bits, create SQL dbs (if desired), create a MOSS farm and some stsadm steps on how to configure it after the build.
  • We would also include into this section Language Packs and Hotfixes, so that every server is always at the right version.

 

4. Customization (or as my boss like's to call it - Flavoring):

  • Here is where we ensure that all customizations are built into a Sharepoint Solution so that customizations can be easily deployed, retracted or upgraded easily.
  • Again, we were lucky to have some devs create a solution install wrapper that allows us to easily manage Solutions so that anyone can manage them, regardless of their experience with Sharepoint.
  • Each farm would have their own group of solutions that would meet that farms need (Flavoring). However, the same solution install tool would be used and common solutions would be available to any farm. 

hope this helps...

wayne