Configuring a BI infrastructure: Hands-on labs

  • Article

 

Applies to: SharePoint Server 2010

This series of articles gives you hands-on experience configuring the various business intelligence services available in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. This involves configuring a SharePoint Server 2010 farm in an isolated test environment and then walking through a series of labs to complete the exact procedures necessary to configure the various business intelligence service applications.

This series includes labs for configuring:

  • Excel Services

  • Visio Services

  • PerformancePoint Services

In each case, there is a lab for configuring the service application and its associated accounts and additional labs for configuring data access.

The first part of this series of labs is a set of labs to create the baseline environment on which the other labs build. This includes creating the SharePoint Server 2010 farm and configuring the Secure Store Service and creating a Business Intelligence Center.

The baseline environment is built by using Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V technology. Although you could build the environment by using other virtualization technologies or physical hardware, those options are not discussed in these labs.

To build the baseline environment, you need a computer that is running Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V enabled.

Note

Instructions for configuring Hyper-V are included in case you have not already configured it.

The computer that you use for the baseline environment must have at least 8 GB of RAM and 100 GB of free disk space. Additional RAM will improve performance, as will distributing the virtual machines across multiple physical disks.

Important

The labs in this series give you hands-on experience configuring the business intelligence offerings in SharePoint Server 2010 by using an isolated Hyper-V test environment. These labs should not be used to create a production deployment of SharePoint Server 2010 on Hyper-V. For information about how to deploy your production SharePoint Server 2010 farm by using Hyper-V, see Use best practice configurations to prepare the Hyper-V environment (SharePoint Server 2010).

To get started with the labs, see Create a baseline environment for a BI test environment.