Upcoming Posts

Having started a new contract last month working predominately on the infrastructure, administration and consultancy side of SharePoint I am missing development a little but in the meantime getting my hands very dirty with some work i'll be blogging in the near future.

I have been particularly working with Powershell, Hyper-V and SharePoint.

Recently I designed and implemented a full new Development lab infrastructure which allows new stand-alone SharePoint 2010 servers to be deployed in Hyper-V with almost 0 configuration from the deployment agent.

In otherwords, I have scripted and automated the entire process using Poweshell with the following processes automated:

• New Virtual Machine created from clone of base server
• New virtual machine configured
• Powershell scripted configuration of the operating system installation
• powershell scripted configuration of networking, renaming the machine, joining the domain
• Powershell scripted configuration of a Sql server 2008 pre-deployment image
• Powershell scripted installation of SharePoint 2010
• Powershell scripted configuration of SharePoint 2010 configuration database and new farm
• powershell scripted deployment of new SharePoint 2010 farm
• powershell scripted deployment of web applications and site collections
• powershell scripted configuration of SSP
• Powershell scripted configuration of search services
• powershell scripted server security configs, terminal services and so forth
• powershell scripted assignment of Alternate access mappings to allow remote access

Basically a fully functioning development lab, fully scripted and deployed in less than 1 hour with no manual overhead for the user other than initiation the process.

I hope to blog most of the process, in particular the scripts them selves and while many other people have deployed similar scripts, the dynamic nature of this type of deployment means they can be re-used in many scenarios.