We have two different approaches towards SharePoint installation such as Standalone installation and Complete installation. Standalone installation is meant for a single server installation scenario where we install everything on a single machine. While Complete installation here refers to farm level installation of SharePoint by separating out the concerns and accessed remotely in the same network infrastructure.
For a complete installation we should draw clear plan around the approach, here the plan for User accounts stands as a critical one among the various requirements. As we know it is desired to have different user accounts for accessing different resources in a network in an efficient manner. So I thought this is the right time to jot down an introduction to various User accounts as follows
SETUP ACCOUNT:
Setup account is the one which is used to run the SharePoint preparation tool, installation and configuration wizards, to create root file structure, assign rights to different accounts etc. It is preferred to be a Domain Admin or member of the Administrator group with SQL Login, security admin and dbcreator roles.
SERVICE ACCOUNTS:
For a single server environment, the network service/local service accounts will work fine for all SharePoint’s services. But when it comes to Farm level installation, it is preferred to have different accounts for various services. So here we have the following Service accounts to be considered as follows
Farm Account: It is the account used by all SharePoint servers in the farm to access the farm’s configuration database and run SharePoint specific services. This is created during the installation of SharePoint. Also it is the SharePoint Timer Service account and application pool identity for Central Administration.
Search Account: This account act as the owner of the Search database and responsible for managing the SharePoint Search.
Index Account: This is known as another owner of the Search database, content access account, crawler, gatherer, and indexer.
Content Database Account: This account act as the owner of the Content database of a web application.
BDC Account: This is used by SharePoint to pass data back and forth between a user, SharePoint and an external data sources using Business Data Connectivity Service. It supports Claims-based authentication.
Sandboxed Code Service Account: It is used by SharePoint to manage solutions that are deployed in a “sandboxed” fashion, not to whole farm but to a single site collection.
So we summarized about the various User accounts to be considered while doing a Complete Farm level installation of SharePoint.
Interesting and very informative.. great:)
ReplyDeletePrasad