At Critical Path Training, we have an ongoing need to build virtual machines (VMs) for our students to use as they work on the lab exercises which are part of our SharePoint 2013 training courses. Until recently, we have been configuring our student VMs using hundreds of manual steps including the creation the service applications using the Farm Configuration Wizard (FCW). We are now switching over to a process for building our VMs where we create and configure the required SharePoint Server 2013 farm using a set of PowerShell scripts. We have found this makes the building of a VM go much faster and it provides the benefit of creating a more stable and predictable environment to write and test our lab exercises.

Since Critical Path Training is an education company, it makes sense for us to give these script away to our students and to anyone else that wants to leverage them or to use them as an education resource to get up to speed on writing PowerShell scripts in a SharePoint 2013 environment. We have posted a zip file to our members site named SP2013FarmBuildoutScripts.zip which you can download using the The SharePoint Server 2013 Farm Build-out scripts (v1.0) link on the Member Downloads page of the CPT website. If you download this zip file, you will find it contains five Windows PowerShell scripts and two Word documents which explain how the scripts work and how you go about running them.

I must acknowledge Gary LaPoint of Aptillon. His book titled Automating Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administration with Windows PowerShell 2.0 is still the best reading resource available today for getting up to speed on Windows PowerShell scripting and understanding how to use Windows PowerShell in SharePoint 2013 environments as well as SharePoint 2010 environments. Also, thanks to Spencer Harbar and his blog for providing the SharePoint community with the details required to get the User Profile Synchronization Service up and running without driving yourself crazy.

I wrote these PowerShell scripts knowing that many Critical Path Training students would be opening them in an effort to understand how to write the PowerShell code required to automate the creation of a SharePoint 2013 farm. I have intentionally simplified the PowerShell code required to make it easier for students to grasp what is going on upon a first read.

There are a few important assumptions that I used to create these scripts. First, these scripts have been written to serve more as an educational resource and not as much as an example of hardened PowerShell scripts which are ready to run in a production environment. Secondly, the SharePoint 2013 farm created by these scripts will be built on a single server. In other words, there is no logic in these scripts to deal with configuration complexity of a multi-server farm. Finally, these scripts do not automate the installation of SharePoint Server 2013 or any other product. Therefore, you must install all the required software including SQL Server 2012 with SP1, SharePoint Server 2013 and Workflow Manager before you can successfully run these scripts.

These scripts focus exclusively on how to configure a SharePoint farm once the product has already been installed. If you want or need to automate the installation of the SharePoint product, you should refer to Gary’s book I mentioned earlier which provides an approach and demonstrates the PowerShell code for doing so.