I am truly excited & honored to be speaking at SharePoint Saturday New Jersey (SPSNJ) on Saturday, September 20th. Its going to be a great event with lots of SharePoint awesomeness. The list of sessions with the equally awesome speakers is available at this Url: http://www.spsevents.org/city/NJ/NJ2014/sessions. There were still a few seats available at the time of writing this blog so I will encourage you to register through this link

The topic of my 10:45 AM session will be: “Workshop: Create your own SharePoint 2013 dev./ test VM, Live!“. As the session title mentions, I will be demonstrating how to create a SharePoint 2013 dev./ test VM from scratch. The steps that I will demonstrate will involve creating a Windows Server 2012 R2 VM and configuring a single click installation PowerShell script that employs industry defined best practices to not only install SharePoint but also prepare the VM for the installation. In this deep dive session, we will:

1. Go through the hands-on of creating a new dev. VM with Windows Server 2012 R2 from scratch
2. Do a walk-through of the single click script and package that will:
   1. Prepare the VM created above for installations
   2. Configure a local Active Directory on the VM
   3. Install and prepare SQL server 2012/ 2014 for SharePoint 2013 installation
   4. Install and configure SharePoint 2013 on it
   5. Finally, as part of this walk-through we will also customize the different scripts so you can walk away not only with your own Windows Server 2012 VM but also with a ready to run single click SharePoint Server 2013 installation package customized to suite your individual needs.

The session also encourages you to create your own VM alongside if you’d like to. You will need the following to be able to do so:

1. Downloads:
   1. VMWare Player 6.0 (free): This is the virtualization tool that we will use for our demo. You can download the free VMWare Player from: https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/free#desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_player/6_0 Please however feel free to use the virtualization tool of your choice.
   2. ISO of Win Server 2012 R2 Eval: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dn205286.aspx
      Note that even though the software selection drop down on the download page mentions the Windows Server Datacenter edition, it really has other editions bundled into it as well. We will be able to select the edition we want to use at the time of the installation.
   3. SQL Server 2014 Eval ISO available here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dn205290.aspx  OR a licensed version of SQL that you might have access to (either SQL Server 2012 SP1 OR SQL Server 2014 will be fine – though we will be using SQL Server 2014 for the live demo)
   4. SharePoint Server 2013 prerequisites: These are available through my Google drive here
   5. SharePoint Server 2013 with SP1: You can download it using your subscription benefits from the subscriber downloads site using your VLSC, MSDN and MPN benefits. Unfortunately there’s no link for the trial version of SharePoint 2013 with SP1 that I can share with you.
   6. SharePoint 2013 September 2014 CU (Optional): During the session, I will also show you how to bundle updates into you SharePoint 2013 installation. This is a completely optionally step and I’ll recommend that you download the extracted files for the CU from my drive here if you’d like to patch your SharePoint instance to the September 2014 CU patch level too. This is a completely optional step but will save you from having to apply a bunch of SharePoint updates later on.
   7. Classic Shell to enable the start menu on Windows Server 2012 available here (recommended but not required): http://www.classicshell.net/downloads/
   8. The scripts package available through my Google drive here. This package contains the following scripts:
      1. SharePoint 2013 Service Accounts Creator: http://sp2013serviceaccount.codeplex.com/
      2. AutoSPInstaller: http://autospinstaller.codeplex.com/
      3. AutoSPSourceBuilder: https://autospsourcebuilder.codeplex.com/
      4. AutoSPInstallerGUI: http://autospinstallergui.codeplex.com/
   9. Finally, as mentioned above, we will create a Windows Server 2012 R2 VM during the session. As a bonus though, I have also uploaded an image of the Windows Server 2012 R2 Trial VM that you can download here. Please ensure that you download all the files and extract the zip archive. Once extracted, you will notice 8 files totaling around 16.3 GB in size.  To download the VM files, you can go with either of the following options:
      1. Add the shared Google drive folder to your Google Drive through the “Add to Drive” button on the top right corner of the page and then use the Google Drive Desktop Client to sync the files to your local computer (recommended) OR
      2. Download the files directly by using the browser “Save target as…” functionality (less recommended)
   10. Please note that while I’ve mentioned eval editions of various software above, you are encouraged to use your own licensed version of the software if you have access to them.
2. Other host requirements: In addition to the above downloads, you will need to ensure the following on/ for your host machine:
   1. You have VMWare workstation 9.0.3 or above OR VMWare Player 6.0 (free) OR another virtualization tool installed on your machine. The VMWare tools will be helpful if you are planning to follow along. But please feel free to use a virtualization tool of your choice.
   2. You are able to allocate at least 12 Gb and a recommended of 16 GB of memory to the guest VM that we will be creating. Ideally, that would mean you have at least 16 to 20 GB RAM available on your host
   3. You have at least 50 GB of free space on the disk that will contain the VM (the downloaded VM files included)
   4. Your host should be running on Windows 7 or above (64 bit) and it supports virtualization

That’s pretty much it. Please feel free to reach out to me via the comments below or through my twitter handle: @mahajang if I can be of further help. I will also be available after the session to answer your questions and in case you’d like help downloading the files. I’ll look forward to seeing you @SPSNJ and I hope you are as excited to be there as I am!