How to install SharePoint 2010 on Windows 2012 R2 Preview

I’ve been playing with the Windows 2012 R2 Preview for a while, and for the most part I approve. Of course once it came out everyone and their dog was installing SharePoint 2013 on it. Why not? SharePoint 2013 is new and cool. I don’t blame them. But I wanted to be original. I wanted to go old school. Plus everyone else blogged installing SharePoint 2013 on it before I could. So I decided to install SharePoint 2010 on it instead. Since SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 2 added Windows 2012 support I figured I’d roll the dice. Was I crazy? Could it be done? Read on and find out.

I didn’t do anything too fancy to set this up. I installed a Windows 2012 R2 domain controller in 2012 R2 domain mode and created all of my usual Service Accounts. Then I spun up a second Windows 2012 R2 VM and joined it to that domain. Since I really only cared about SharePoint, I started on that before I even installed SQL. If I could get the Prereqs installed and get the SharePoint 2010 bits laid down, then I’d take the time to install SQL 2012 SP1. Let’s spin the wheel and see what happens.

Sadly, I met with disappointment immediately. I ran the SharePoint 2010 Prereq installer and it failed on the very first step.

Much like me in 7th grade football, the Prereq installer has one failure and just gives up. It wasn’t able to configure IIS on the server. That’s no surprise, IIS has changed a lot since SharePoint 2010 came out and Windows 2008 R2 was the cool kid on the block. Like any self-respecting nerd I dusted myself off, drank some Mountain Dew, and dove right into the log files to see what had gone wrong. The Prereq installer even had a link to the log file, almost daring me to try to figure out what happened. I opened the file and did a “Ctrl-F” find for “error.” I found our culprit:

The Prereq installer was trying to install the .NET components into IIS and not having much luck. For the benefit of search engines (and to make this blog post look longer than it really is) I’ve included the text from the error:

2013-09-01 16:05:03 - "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe" -i
2013-09-01 16:05:03 - Error: Unable to install (2)
2013-09-01 16:05:03 - Error: [In HRESULT format] (-2147024894)
2013-09-01 16:05:03 - Error when registering ASP.NET v2.0.50727 with IIS
2013-09-01 16:05:03 - Last return code (2)
2013-09-01 16:05:03 - Error: The tool was unable to install Application Server Role, Web Server (IIS) Role.
2013-09-01 16:05:03 - Last return code (2)
2013-09-01 16:05:03 - Options for further diagnostics: 1. Look up the return code value 2. Download the prerequisite manually and verify size downloaded by the prerequisite installer. 3. Install the prerequisite manually from the given location without any command line options.
2013-09-01 16:05:03 - Cannot retry

Fortunately it shows us exactly what the problem is. It tried to run aspnet_regiis.exe –i and it didn’t work. Out to the file system I go to see what’s up. It wasn’t good news:

Aspnet_regiis.exe was nowhere to be found. I’ve gotten pretty friendly with Windows 2012 so I had some ideas where to look for my missing friend. Since I was already in PowerShell I executed the following command:

Get-WindowsFeature | Where-Object {$_.name -like "*net*" }

If this doesn’t work for you, type Import-module servermanager to add the Get-WindowsFeature cmdlet.

This was to see which .NET features were installed. There was one Windows Feature that might be our missing link:

The ASP.NET 3.5 Feature includes .NET 2.0 and 3.0 so that might fit the bill. To add it, you’ll need your Windows 2012 R2 source media. Assuming your media is in your D: drive, the command to add it would look like this:

Add-WindowsFeature Web-Asp-Net -Source D:\sources\sxs

This will add the asp.net stuff that the Prereq installer wants. When you rerun the Prereq it’s all happy and it finishes successfully. On the back of this success I went ahead and installed SharePoint 2010. It worked. I decided to go for broke and see if I could actually get it all to work. I installed SQL and created a SharePoint farm. Once the farm was created I created a web app. Everything seems to work fine.

Here’s the finished product:

I know, I know. Portal.contoso.com could be hosted anywhere. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

Since Windows Server 2012 R2 isn’t out yet, so SharePoint 2010 doesn’t officially support it. It does seem to work though.

tk

ShortURL: http://www.toddklindt.com/SP2010onWin2012R2