Sitecore 9 Installation using SIF – As easy as cooking a delicious meal.

Being a foodie who loves cooking, while installing my first Sitecore XP 9 using SIF though surprisingly but I feel like cooking a delicious meal .

Well, I am pretty sure that after reading the first line may be you will react something like this guy:

But I found both the processes quite similar. How?

Getting ready with all the ingredients needed for the meal Vs Getting ready with all the Pre-requisites needed.
Freedom to serve as buffet or À la carte – as both comes with flexibility to choose between what you like to use as ingredients Vs which features you like to include/exclude e.g. xConnect, xDB, Search Index etc.
Rather blindly following the predefined steps to cook/install Vs freedom to customize the process/configuration based on your taste/requirement.
Garnishing the meal Vs Post Installation Steps
Enjoying the finger licking meal Vs enjoying the amazing capabilities of SC9.

Recently got chance to install the latest and the greatest Sitecore Experience Platform 9 using Sitecore Installation Framework (SIF) on my local developer environment using XP0 topology.

Hence thought of sharing the recipe with you all as the meal is looking damn delicious and I am dying to enjoy it, although it will take time to finish and digest the whole bowl cause as we know that Sitecore 9 comes with a lot of new powerful tools to explore.

As before cooking any meal it is always a good idea to collect all the required ingredients to avoid last time surprises or haste. Hence in this blog post let’s talk about all the pre-requisites needed to install Sitecore 9 via SIF.

Environment Pre-requisites

Internet Information Service (IIS)

Feel free to choose any of these two IIS versions – IIS 8.5 or IIS 10.0. Best bet is to use the IIS which your operating system supports. I am using IIS 10.0

Operating System

Any client and server operating systems that support .NET Framework 4.6.2 or later is a good fit for XP 9.0. Feel free to chose any one from the list below:

Windows Server 2016
Windows Server 2012 R2 (64-bit)
Windows 10 (32/64-bit) – I am on Windows 10 64 Bit
Windows 8.1 (32/64-bit)

.Net Framework

Sitecore XP 9.0 requires .NET Framework 4.6.2 or later. I am on 4.6.2.

Visual studio

Sitecore XP 9.0 requires Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 or later, targeting .NET Framework 4.6.2. I am using Visual Studio 2017.

Database

Sitecore 9.0 supports the following database servers:

Microsoft SQL Server 2016 SP1: This version supports the XM databases and the only supported version for the Experience Database (xDB). I am using SQL Server Express 2016.
Microsoft SQL Server 2014 SP2: This version only supports XM databases and does not support the Experience Database (xDB).

Search Index

Sitecore supports the following indexing providers:

Solr 6.6.1
- For the XP0 and XP1 topologies, Solr is the default search provider.
Lucene
- For the XM1 topology, Lucene is the default search provider. Note Lucene only supports Content Search and does not support xConnect.
Azure Search
- The Azure Search provider is supported for Azure Cloud PAAS deployments only.

Hardware: For a Server Running a Single Sitecore Installation

To run a single Sitecore installation, the minimum configuration requirements are:

4 core processor
16GB of RAM

Java Runtime Environment

Install the latest version of JRE. I am using 1.8.0_151.

Microsoft Powershell 5.1 or higher

Make sure you have Powershell 5.1 or higher installed. If not you can download it from here.

Web Platform Installer 5.0

Make sure you have Web Platform Installer 5.0. if not you download it from here.

Most importantly the License File

Although Sitecore recently launched a free 60 days trial for developer but that is on hold for sometime and will be available again in 2018. If you already registered for the same and was able to get your free license, you can you that else you can still register and be in the queue. Or if you are a partner or customer contact your Sitecore sales rep for the same. I am using my trial license.

Rather having a long post by detailing all the steps together I decided to divide each step in a separate post so that the content is more readable and you can follow the steps more precisely.

Once you are ready with the pre-requisites, please have a look at the below series of blogs describing each step in details: