Deploying MOSS 2007 on a Medium sized Farm (3 Servers)

This has not been without the normal issues but here's how i installed MOSS over a 3 server farm environment.

To install MOSS i have pretty much followed the Microsoft Technet documentation Deploy in a simple server farm (Online Technet webpage).

This is a pretty typical medium sized farm consisting of a database server running SQL Server 2005, one front end web server also running the Search Indexing service and one Office application server also running the Search Query service & Central Administration.

Some points MS note before starting:

• You must install MOSS on the same drive on all load balanced front end server computers
• You must install MOSS on a clean installation of MS Windows Server 2003 SP1 or later. If you uninstall and then reinstall MOSS may fail to create the config DBs. (This is not always the case - i have tried out both on clean and 'dirty' servers).
• You must use the Complete installation option on all servers you want to be index, query or Excel Calc servers.
• Each index server in a farm requires its own SSP.
• If you uninstall Office SharePoint Server 2007 from the first server on which you installed it, your farm might experience problems. It is not recommended that you install Office SharePoint Server 2007 on an index server first.
• Setup installs the Central Administration Web site on the first server on which you run Setup. Therefore, we recommend that the first server on which you install Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a server from which you want to run the Central Administration Web site.

What I Did:

Using clean servers running Windows Server 2003 SP1

The admin & service accounts used are listed in the document MOSS Admin & Service Accounts (access is restricted)

1. Set up SQL Server with SQL 2005 only
   
   • Add the SQL Service account via SQL Management Studio.
2. Install .NET Framework 3 onto both DEV01 & 2
3. Enable ASP.NET 2.0 on both DEV01 & 2
4. Install MOSS on to DEV01
5. Run SP Configuration Wizard on DEV01 to create a new server farm.
6. Install MOSS on to DEV02
7. Run SP Configuration Wizard on DEV02 to connect to the existing server farm.
8. Stop the WSS Web Application service on DEV01 (this server is not serving any content). If you dont do this then the web apps will be hosted on the wrong server. See my post about this: How to point your web applications to the WFE server
9. Start the Office SP Server Search service (Query) on DEV01 - MS says to do this after starting the Index service, however I found that it did not like starting the Index server and hung on service startup. See my post about this: Getting your search service from starting to started.
10. Start the Office SP Server Search service (Index) on DEV02.
11. Create the Web Applications to host the SSPs
    
    • MOSS SSP1 Admin
      
    • MOSS SSP2 Admin
      
    • MOSS SSP3 Admin
12. Create the Web Applications to host the Portals & My Sites using port 80 & host headers.
    
    • MOSS 1
      
    • MOSS 2
      
    • MOSS 3
13. Create the three Shared Service Providers using port 80 & host headers.
    
    • MOSS SSP1
      
    • MOSS SSP2
      
    • MOSS SSP3
14. Create the top level site collections
    
    • Portal 1
      
    • Portal 2
      
    • Portal 3