Enable Windows 2012 R2 Features for SharePoint 2013 SP1

The information regarding installing SharePoint 2013 Sp1 on Windows 2012 R2 is limited, especially what do you need to do an offline installation. In our case, we have Windows 2012 R2 configured with a standard configuration from the server team and deliver to us. These servers have no internet connection at all. So we have search on line and found some good articles to start with. Here are the ones I have referenced to:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/cjrawson/archive/2014/04/06/offline_2d00_sharepoint2013sp1_2d00_prerequisites_2d00_server2012r2.aspx

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/14582.sharepoint-2013-install-prerequisites-offline-or-manually-on-windows-server-2012-a-comprehensive-guide.aspx

http://soussi-imed.over-blog.com/article-installing-sharepoint-2013-on-windows-server-2012-r2-120547920.html

Before you run the Prerequisite, you need to configure server roles and enable some features. If you can run the feature-enable PowerShell script from those articles, congratulations!! In our case, we could not.

So, we have to manually using UI to enable required roles and features. All of the articles I have read so far mentioned following features are needed:

Roles

• Application Server
• Web Server (IIS)
• IIS 6 Management Console

Features   

• ASP.NET 4.5
• Windows Identity Foundation 3.5

During the process, you also need to enable IIS Support (separate item to check the check box). There are few required features needed that would install together.

We followed and enabled all of them in one of our servers. However, Prerequisite returned en error regarding it could not configure IIS. After looking into the error log, we found out Prerequisite was looking .NET 3.5, which was not mentioned in any of the articles we found.

Once we have .NET 3.5 enabled, it went through like a charm.

I believe sometime when we put down some information to share, we may accidentally assumed something was there or available. In this case. .NET 3.5 was needed but not mentioned.

Before you start your journey, make sure .NET 3.5 is also enabled with your Windows 2012 R2 servers.

Good luck!

SharePoint User Profile Services and Different Domain Names

If your environment has User Profile Service, have you noticed that whether all users are under the same domain? In our case, we were not and it created other issues when we want to use profile data. For example, when we want to query a user profile data, we don't know which domain this user was mapping to and it is hard to predict. In order to fix this problem, we have to fix this problem and have all users under the same Net BIOS domain name.

There are articles to show you how to do it. For example, you can find steps from this blog: http://tremblayse.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/ups-and-netbios-domain-name-different-then-fqdn-domain-name/. Since there are enough information on-line already, I would like to just mention our experience when we perform this change.

1. Make sure you have tested it in a non-production environment and document all your steps. This is very important to help you when you implement it in your production environment.
2. We have User Profile Service been running for a while. Some articles mentioned that you may want to delete it first. From my opinion, you don't have to, especially if your environment has large number of users or they have updated/added information to their profiles.
3. Before you start making changes, make sure both services are running. If you are not sure their status, you may want to go to the Central Administration site and restart both of them, one at a time.
4. After using PowerShell to enable NetBiosDomainNamesEnabled attribute, run the command with "True" to confirm it is up and running.
5. Reset IIS and restart timer job services. I did not do it in the test environment but had to do it in production one.
6. Some article mentioned that you can delete the profile sync connection before you executing the PowerSheel command. I did not do this first and you may want consider to delete it first. However, make sure you have a screen shot of the connection settings page before you delete it.
7. When you delete the connection and failed, don't panic and just restart both profile services again from the Central Administration site. Try to delete the connection again. If it is not there after you restart both services, you are fine.
8. After the new connection is created, run full sync once and give it several night to verify the number of users are imported. If the number does not seem to be right, make sure you have selected all OUs that have users. Rerun full sync if necessary.

The whole process may take over night to import and re-process all profile data. When it is done, you should be able to find all users are mapping to the Net BIOS domain name.

Hope this will help you to go through the changes smoother.