SharePoint 2010 Silent Install

I’ve been doing SharePoint 2007 silent installs now for quite awhile.  SharePoint 2010 beta is out and I obviously wanted to see if the same files still worked so that I can use the same processes I have in place when I do installs.  Below is what I was using before as my config.xml answer file:

<Configuration>

    <Package Id="sts">

        <Setting Id="LAUNCHEDFROMSETUPSTS" Value="Yes"/>

        <Setting Id="REBOOT" Value="ReallySuppress"/>

        <Setting Id="SETUPTYPE" Value="CLEAN_INSTALL"/>

    </Package>

    <Package Id="spswfe">

        <Setting Id="SETUPCALLED" Value="1"/>

        <Setting Id="REBOOT" Value="ReallySuppress"/>

        <Setting Id="OFFICESERVERPREMIUM" Value="1" />

    </Package>

    <Logging Type="verbose" Path="%temp%" Template="Office Server Setup(*).log"/>

    <Display Level="none" CompletionNotice="Yes" />

    <PIDKEY Value="{MSDN KEY FOR EDITION OF SHAREPOINT 2007}" />

    <Setting Id="SERVERROLE" Value="APPLICATION"/>

    <Setting Id="USINGUIINSTALLMODE" Value="0"/>

</Configuration>

If your not familiar, config.xml comes from the templates that Microsoft gives you in the installer disc.  If you mount the SharePoint 2007 installer disc and dig into the install directory, you’ll see a “Files” directory.  If you poke in there you should see the following:

If you drill into one of those SharePoint 2007 Files folders you’ll find a config.xml file which is the shell of what you’ll need to do a silent install.  Below is what the SetupFarmSilent config.xml looks like

<Configuration>

    <Package Id="sts">

        <Setting Id="LAUNCHEDFROMSETUPSTS" Value="Yes"/>

        <Setting Id="REBOOT" Value="ReallySuppress"/>

        <Setting Id="SETUPTYPE" Value="CLEAN_INSTALL"/>

    </Package>

    <Package Id="spswfe">

        <Setting Id="SETUPCALLED" Value="1"/>

        <Setting Id="REBOOT" Value="ReallySuppress"/>

        <Setting Id="OFFICESERVERPREMIUM" Value="1" />

    </Package>

    <Logging Type="verbose" Path="%temp%" Template="Office Server Setup(*).log"/>

    <Display Level="none" CompletionNotice="no" />

    <PIDKEY Value="Enter PID Key Here" />

    <Setting Id="SERVERROLE" Value="APPLICATION"/>

    <Setting Id="USINGUIINSTALLMODE" Value="0"/>

</Configuration>

The only real difference from the config.xml at the top and the one right above is that I changed CompletionNotice="Yes" which tells the installer to let me know when the install is done.

Ok, so now that your armed with this silent install config file, how do i run it?  Easy!

setup.exe /config c:\{location of your config file}\config.xml

Now your probably asking yourself what’s the story with SharePoint 2010?  Is it the same process or different?

Well, here is what the installer Files directory looks like for SharePoint 2010:

As you can see nothing really different here other than its 1 folder less than the 2007 version, the “SetupFarmSidebySide”.

Here is what the SharePoint 2010 config.xml looks like for the “SetupFarmSilent”

<Configuration>

    <Package Id="sts">

        <Setting Id="LAUNCHEDFROMSETUPSTS" Value="Yes"/>

    </Package>

    <Package Id="spswfe">

        <Setting Id="SETUPCALLED" Value="1"/>

        <Setting Id="OFFICESERVERPREMIUM" Value="1" />

    </Package>

    <Logging Type="verbose" Path="%temp%" Template="SharePoint Server Setup(*).log"/>

    <!--<PIDKEY Value="Enter Product Key Here" />-->

    <Display Level="none" CompletionNotice="no" />

    <Setting Id="SERVERROLE" Value="APPLICATION"/>

    <Setting Id="USINGUIINSTALLMODE" Value="0"/>

    <Setting Id="SETUP_REBOOT" Value="Never" />

    <Setting Id="SETUPTYPE" Value="CLEAN_INSTALL"/>

</Configuration>

Lets compare a 2007 and a 2010 config.xml

The file on the left is the 2007 config.xml and the file on the right is the 2010 config.xml.  As you can see they are basically the same, the only real difference I can see is that the 2010 config.xml moved 1 or 2 of the settings around, but essentially the files contain the same information.

Now that we’ve compared the files, does the same command to setup SharePoint 2007 silently from a config.xml file still work in 2010?

I ran the following command against the SharePoint 2010 installer (after installing all the SharePoint 2010 prereq’s of course.  See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485%28office.14%29.aspx).

setup.exe /config c:\{location of customized config}\config.xml

After about 7 or 8 minutes I got the following message back

So as you can see, doing a silent install in SharePoint 2010 is pretty much the same as it was in 2007.  Now that you’ve got SharePoint 2010 installed, its time to do a scripted configuration of the farm.  Look for a blog posting soon on doing so because I’ll be going through the steps personally and will certainly share the info for all.