Recently I had to give a Power View demo for a client. Giving a demonstration means of course you have a demo environment available. I could’ve simply given a demo on Power View using Office 2013 and call it a day, but I really wanted to show the “convert Power View report to PowerPoint” feature, which is only available in Power View for SharePoint. And also because I wanted to write this blog post series of course.
Since I hadn’t a demo environment with SQL Server 2012 and SharePoint 2013 available, I decided to build one from scratch and share all the steps I’ve taken in these blog posts. This series will be a lot like the one by BI Monkey (blog | twitter), except that I’ll be using SharePoint 2013 and SQL Server 2012 SP1 features. Furthermore, I didn’t set-up a domain controller because I didn’t feel the need for it in a small demo environment. Also, I wanted to test out if it was possible to set-up such an environment missing a demo controller without SharePoint going into a tantrum. For demo environments used by more than 1 user or actual test/production environments, I really encourage you to configure a proper domain. For instruction on how to do this, read the blog post by BI Monkey: Build your own SQL 2012 Demo Machine – Part 3 – Installing and Configuring Windows Server 2008R2.
The demo environment will be created on a single VM, so it is easy to bring on an external disk or easy to exchange between colleagues who will also be giving demos. I will use Hyper-V for the virtual environment, but most or even all functionality can also be done with Oracle VirtualBox.
The Hardware
If you want to run a single server environment like this one on your laptop, you better have the necessary hardware available. I have a 250GB SSD drive where the VM will be stored, 32GB of RAM and an Intel Core i7 processor with in total 8 cores. If you don’t have a laptop like this available (especially the amount of RAM is important to run SharePoint smoothly), you could option to create your environment in the cloud. That way you always have your environment available to you, provided you have an Internet connection.
The Software
I’ll be using SQL Server 2012 SP1 Developer Edition, SharePoint Server 2013 Enterprise edition and Office 2013 Professional Plus.
Summary
The series consists of the following parts:
- Part 1 – Overview (what you’re looking at right now)
- Part 2 – Building the VM
- Part 3 – Installing the OS
- Part 4 – Installing SQL Server
- Part 5 – Installing SharePoint
- Part 6 – Installing PowerPivot for SharePoint
- Part 7 – Configuring SharePoint
- Part 8 – Verifying PowerPivot Integration
- Part 9 – Installing Reporting Services
- Part 10 – Creating a BI site
The links to these parts will be updated when the series progresses.
Next part: Building the VM.
Koen Verbeeck is a Microsoft Business Intelligence consultant at element61, helping clients to get insight in their data. Koen has a comprehensive knowledge of the SQL Server BI stack, with a particular love for Integration Services. He's also a speaker at various conferences.
12 Comments
Good initiative, this blog series, I will definitely follow!
I’m a big fan of the series! I’ve been playing around with the idea of building my own playground like this one, and this series encouraged me to do so.
Koen, would these instructions apply well to the Azure services using VMs? Any warnings if we want to set up a lab in the cloud?
@Peter: the principles of setting up a VM for Azure would be the same. Not sure about the domain controller though. I left it out, but you might include it for your VM in the cloud.
I’ve been meaning to test this out, but here in Belgium we have quite slow upload speeds, so uploading 40GB into Azure is a bit problematic.
I was planning on just using a lot of the pre-configured images to handle the majority of the heavy lifting as I have this linked to an MSDN account. I think I’d still need to upload a Sharepoint ISO, but not 100% sure about that. Also not sure if I should try to configure this as a single server or use the more correct configuration of multiple servers. Seeing that you have this step-by-step for a single server, I’m leaning that way.
The multiple server set-up is definately harder to do than a single server set-up, especially security wise. Since it’s just a simple demo enviroinment I’d like to share with colleagues on a usb stick, I opted for the single server environment.
Hi Koen,
I’ve followed your blog and finished successfully. Bu got a big problem making a BISM connection in PowerPivot gallery. The problem arises at verifying the connection and using it for Powerview. Tried several solutions, but none successfully.
Situation:
+ No domain
+ SPFarm is administrator, can access all databases RDMBS an SSAS
+ Stopped “Claims to Windows Token Service” and restarted IIS
Any ideas?
Arne
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Had to prepare a demo for Management, followed your blog and everything works great. A big big thank you.
If I have a farm that has SP2013 with a SQL 2008 R2 backend, can I still get the proper 2013 BI components installed if I install a new web app and the SQL components using a separate SQL2012 SP1 box?
Hi Jason,
to be honest, I have no idea.
I know you need SQL Server 2012 for the fancy BI features, but I’m not sure what happens when you mix different SQL Server editions. You better consult with an actual SharePoint expert on this.
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