In this blog post I show how to remove the GUID from the Central Admin content database. But that’s being reactive. All the cool kids know being proactive is where it’s at. So how do we create our SharePoint 2010 farm without that cursed database with a GUID in the first place? I’m glad you asked. That’s what this blog post is going to show you.
If your Central Admin content database has a GUID at the end, that means you used the Configuration Wizard (psconfigui.exe) to build your farm. There’s no shame in that at all, it’s how 90% of the SharePoint farms are built. Unfortunately it does create that one bad database. We can fix that though.
Like SharePoint 2007, all of the tasks that PSConfigUI.exe do can be replaced by various command line tools. In SharePoint 2010 we can do it all with PowerShell. First, we have to NOT run the Configuration Wizard after you install SharePoint. When you get to this screen, uncheck the box to run the Configuration Wizard and click “Close.”
After the box has closed, open up the SharePoint Management Shell from the Start button.
When it opens you’ll get an error like this:
That’s completely expected, as there is no farm to access yet. No worries though, we’ll remedy that. We will run the commands below to build our farm. I’ll include the text for easier copying and pasting:
New-SPConfigurationDatabase -DatabaseName SharePoint_Config -DatabaseServer sharepoint -AdministrationContentDatabaseName SharePoint_Admin_Content
Install-SPHelpCollection -All
Initialize-SPResourceSecurity
Install-SPService
Install-SPFeature -AllExistingFeatures
New-SPCentralAdministration -Port 1026 -WindowsAuthProvider "NTLM"
Install-SPApplicationContent
Here’s what the first command looks like:
The point of this blog post isn’t to automate the install, so I didn’t provide a couple of pieces of information. When you run the New-SPConfigurationDatabase cmdlet you’ll be prompted for the Farm account username and password as well as the farm passphrase. After you enter those, it will churn a bit and then you’re the proud owner of a new SharePoint farm. The cmdlet above creates a config db named “SharePoint_Config” on the database server “SharePoint.” It also creates the central admin content database and names it “SharePoint_Admin_Content” That’s the whole reason we did all this. If we create the farm with PSConfigUI it will generate an admin database with a GUID at the end. Creating the farm with PowerShell gets us around that.
At this point you have two options, you can continue to build your farm with the PowerShell commands above. The rest will run without any other intervention. Or, you can run PSConfigUI and finish up the machine configuration. Either way is fine and gets you the same GUIDless farm. The PowerShell cmdlets above will create Central Admin on port 1026 and set it to use NTLM.
tk