Installing the Server 2012 OS - SharePoint Tutorial

- We've done some planning, we've done some math, we've figured out gigabytes and megabytes and allocated resources and all that's fine and dandy, in fact, that is a minimal amount of planning when you talk about working with SharePoint. Planning a SharePoint implementation for production would literally take weeks at a minimum if not months. But this is our development and testing environment, not production. Onto the fun stuff. We're going to install the OS and configure it for the Domain Controller. I'm going to highlight the DC which is my Domain Controller and then down here I'm going to click Start. You could also, if you wanted to, double click the Domain Controller to connect to it and then you could click the Start button which would appear in that window. But I just did it that way and I'll do it the other way for the SharePoint server just to have a variety. Once it's running, I'm going to go ahead and double click it to, actually, create a connection to it. Right away I'm going to be asked for some information. Now, what I like to do is I like to put this into full screen mode so I'm going to click View, Full Screen Mode. Right away I'm prompted with this information. I need to choose what it is that makes sense for my organization, my area. English, English, US is right for me. I'll click Next and I'll click Install now. Setup is starting. The selecting operating system you want to install, I'm going to choose Windows Server 2012 Standard (with a GUI) and I'm going to click Next. Okay, I'll accept the license terms. Depending on your configuration of Windows Server 2012 and what your particular source of it is, you may see or have to enter your license number in here. I'll click Next. Here, I'm going to click Custom: Install Windows only. The drive that I want is already highlighted, 127.0 GB, that's fine. I'll click Next. Now, I'm going to let Windows Server 2012 do its thing including any restarts that are required to get me up and running. All right! We have gone through quite a few fun and exciting adventures as Server 2012 did its thing. Actually, that didn't take that long in our environment over here, it took about 10 minutes. I'll go ahead and add my administrator's password and click Finish. All right, so our service telling us it's ready to sign in. Here's the thing, I'm in Full Screen Mode. You can see by this little bar up here at the top, it looks like I'm in a remote desktop connection. If type in Ctrl+Alt+Delete, I'll, actually, be sending that command to the host machine. In Hyper-V, what I can do is while I'm in Full Screen Mode, I can hit Ctrl+Alt+End and that will send a Ctrl+Alt+Delete to the actual virtual machine. So that's what I did. Now, I'll type in my password and in just a few moments, the Server 2012 default desktop and Server Manager kick up, and I'm ready to go to start my favorite part of the entire operation which is updates. First thing I want to do, after this is all done is get updates going. But before I do that, I'm going to click Local Server and I go over here to IE Enhanced Security Configuration and I'm going to turn that to off. I'm going to click On over here and I'm going to set it to Off for Administrators and Users. Again, since this is not production, I'm just going to turn that off. Once I do that, that will make it easier if I need to go to different websites or things like that to download things. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to change the Computer name of my Domain Controller. Hyper-V assigned it this name, I'm going to click on Computer name here and I'm going to change it to DC. I'm going to keep this really simple because typing things like that nice long name that it had can become difficult. So I'll click Computer name, change it to DC, click OK. And it's going to need to restart. I'll click OK here and the virtual machine is going to go ahead and restart when I hit Close here. Restart Now. All right, I'm back up at the Ctrl+Alt+Delete screen so I'm in full screen as indicated by this blue remote desktop-looking bar up here so I'll hit Ctrl+Alt+End, I'll type in my administrator's password. I'll give it a few moments to let everything that I did take effect. Server Manager's very helpful but what I'm going to do is I'm going to click Manage and then I'm going to click Server Manager Properties and I'm going to check the box that says "Do not start Server Manager automatically on login" I can start it whenever I want by just clicking the icon down there in the taskbar. In addition to that, I'll click the Windows key, go ahead and click on Internet Explorer and I'm going to set the homepage to be, well, lynda.com. When I do this, I'll be asked to use recommended security and compatibility settings, don't use recommended settings. I'm just going to say "Use recommended settings" and click OK. Then I'm going to come over here to the gear, that little icon there, go to Internet options and I'm going to change the homepage to http://www.lynda.com. Then I'll click OK. I'll close Internet Explorer. I'm going to go back to the Start screen and just validate that that took, and yeap, lynda.com is now the homepage. That just assures that I'm not going to be blocked by that IE Security feature that is helpful on Domain Controller, specifically in production, but here it might, kind of, get in our way. Now that we're done with all that, I'm going to click the Windows key and I'm going to type in windows updates. You'll see that in the Settings section, I have four options, one of which is Install optional updates. What I need to do is I need to click Turn on automatic updates. For now, that will be a setting that I want to do and it will begin checking for updates. This may take a while. The first time you install it, you may run into something like this, Install the new Windows Update software so you can get the update. I'll click Install now. This may take a while so we'll pick back up as soon as it's done. All right, so we're going to go ahead and I'm going to click on this 118 important updates are available. Please keep in mind, your number may vary greatly. What I'm going to do is I'm just, kind of, get a quick synopsis. I'm going to click this button here to select everything and then click Install. And I'm going to let it do its thing. Now, it may restart a few times throughout this process and if it does and requires any action, I'll go ahead and come back in. but if it's just a matter or restarting and it picks up and picks up, we're going to let that flow through. I'll come back at the next point at which I need to take action. After actually a few hours, Windows has come up with the Ctrl+Alt+Delete screen after restarting itself several times. First, I'll click the machine, I'll hit Ctrl+Alt+End and put in my password. Then while I'm here, I'm going to go ahead and eject the server operating system ISO from this machine. I'm going to click this Restore Down button which will give me the actual menu items I need. Then I'll click Media, DVD Drive and I'm going to say "Eject the ISO." That's, basically, the equivalent of opening up the DVD tray and taking the DVD out. Now, that I've got that out, I'll put it back into Full Screen Mode, I'll hit the Windows key and I'm going to type in windows update. I'll click on Settings and here we see Install optional updates. What I'm doing here is I'm making sure that I've got all the latest and greatest updates. Sometimes when you install a bunch of updates, it finishes and you get a screen that says "No updates are available," when in fact, if you click Check for updates, like I did right there, it may, in fact, come back and say "Oh, there's an optional update" or "There's more updates." I'm just going to make sure that after getting no updates are available, I go ahead and click Check for updates and I want to see that screen again before I'm ready to move on to my next section. Now, just like before, this may take a while. We'll come back when this is ready. As you can see, Windows has found 19 more important updates. Here's the deal, I'm going to continue that exact process until I can get two times in a row Windows telling me "No updates are available." I'm not going to have you watch all of that, I'm just letting you know that I'm going to come back when I'm at that state in this process.