Yesterday, I decided to try out SharePoint Foundation 2013 on a fresh Windows Server 2012. I decided to install SharePoint Foundation in a standalone mode. This is the installation process I followed:
First start the SharePoint Foundation installation wizard. There you select ”Install software prerequisites”. During this process, be sure that you have an internet connection, because it will download all dependencies during the installation process of the prerequisites. Your machine will reboot twice (in my case), so just to let you know that your machine must be able to perform a reboot.
Next step is to click on “Install SharePoint Foundation“. In my case, I didn’t reboot yet, so I got this warning:
But once I’ve rebooted, everything went fine. First step in the installation is to select the installation mode. In my case, this was Stand-alone:
After completing the installation, the “SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard” starts. Because it’s a stand-alone mode, it will not ask my any questions, and it will start configuring my SharePoint instance.
On thing that I noticed was the fact that Step 2 took really long, but my system was not really doing anything special. Until I got this error after a while:
Failed to connect to the configuration database.
An exception of type System.Management.Automation.CmdletInvocationException was thrown. Additional exception information: ErrorCode<NonDomainNWService>:SubStatus<ES0001>:Service running under Network Service account in workgroup environment is not supported.
Looks like when you perform a stand-alone installation, and your service is running with the Network Service Account on a machine not connected to Active Directory, the configuration database could not be created. Bummer!
The solution to this can be found on this technet link. It’s quite simple (once you know it). Open your commandline prompt and navigate to “C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\15\BIN”
There you execute the command:
psconfig.exe -cmd Configdb create SkipRegisterAsDistributedCacheHost
This will now create your configuration database, and skipping the error that the GUI gave us. So, one step further, the configuration database has been created. What you can do now is re-run the configuration wizard to continue the rest of the configuration steps. But now, you will see another error:
As Neil Sly described in his post on technet:
This was an issue when installing SP2010 Beta, specifically when trying to create search service where this same error crept up, then the solution was essentially to script the installation of search.
Despite psconfig failing I decided to try Central Admin – which loaded without issue. Checking service apps I can see “error” next to Search – so again, the issue crops up in this beta.
And indeed, if you open the SharePoint Central Administration window, you see your brand new SharePoint Foundation 2013 instance.
When you look at the “Service Applications“, you will indeed see that there is an error in the Search SA:
That’s all, enjoy your SharePoint 2013 Foundation.
thanks for sharing, that work for me doing a standalone install in a virtual machine
Work for me too. So how to fix the search problem ?
Hi,
First of all, great post, and thank you for the pioneering work you do with SP 2013!
I have a question for you as an expert:
We have a setup of SP 2010 and we are planning to upgrade it to 2013. The question is, will said upgrade preserve various add-ons and plugins such as Harmon.ie (URL http://harmon.ie)?
We’re obviously interested in preserving the user’s experience as similar as possible as far as third party tools are concerned.
Hi,
The upgrade will preserve your add-ons, and by default, the upgraded sites are still in SharePoint 2010 mode. This means that the sites can truly remain running in SharePoint 2010 mode until a site owner or administrator explicitly upgrades the site to the new user interface.
Good luck!