KC Productive Collaboration: 7 Steps to SharePoint 2013 HA Farm in Azure

QUESTION: How many months, weeks, days does it take to provision the infrastructure to deploy your SharePoint FARM? What if with careful design and planning; you’ll be up and running in minutes using the Azure cloud to configure, deploy, and manage all the infrastructure required for you next SharePoint deployment.

The REMAINING time can be focused on INNOVATION and GROWTH of BUSINESS activities required to drive your business to the next level with more focus.

You can now easily deploy a two or three-tier SharePoint Server 2013 farm in Azure. This is designed to help you quickly create an Internet-facing SharePoint farm for dev/test, demonstration, or proof-of-concept purposes.

The SharePoint 2013 HA Farm template deploys a SharePoint Server 2013 three-tier farm topology including Active Directory Domain Services and Microsoft SQL Server in a high-availability configuration with nine servers and 29 cores (using default virtual machine sizes). The completed deployment consists of two Windows Server 2012 R2 domain controllers, two SQL Server 2014 servers and a cluster majority node server configured with SQL Server Always On Availability Groups, and four SharePoint Server 2013 servers (two web front ends and two application servers).

Each farm is configured with just a single web application and site collection. The SharePoint service application deployment is left to you to configure.

Create a SharePoint HA Farm in Minutes using Azure Deployment template.

Focus on the WHY

Focus on the WHEN

Less focus on HOW; let the Azure Deployment wizard guide you through the installation.

SharePoint farm name	Name our FARM
Subscription Type	Based on your subscription enrollment
Resource Group	Resource Group to manage your resources
Location	Where in the World you want to host?

Username	Administrator account to manage the virtual machines
Password	Password for the account
Confirm Password
Storage account name prefix	Prefix to name your storage account
Storage account type With estimate pricing per Month for Storage per 100GB; pick the storage configuration based on the requirements based on the high availability requirements
Virtual Network Name	Name of the Virtual network or reuse an existing one already created

Forest root domain name	Fully qualified domain name
Active Directory virtual machine size With estimate pricing per Month; pick the configuration based on the requirements based on the high availability requirements

SQL Server virtual machine size With estimate pricing per Month; pick the configuration based on the requirements based on the high availability requirements
SQL Witness virtual machine size With estimate pricing per Month; pick the configuration based on the requirements based on the high availability requirements
Service account name	Account to run the SQL services
Service account password	Account password
Confirm password

Public IP address for SharePoint web tier	Name space for Public IP address to get assigned
Domain name label for SharePoint web tier	DNS label for SharePoint web tier
SharePoint virtual machine size With estimate pricing per Month; pick the configuration based on the requirements based on the high availability requirements
Setup user account username & password	Domain account used to run setup SharePoint product installation
Server farm account username & password	Domain account used to run the SharePoint Central Administration services
SharePoint farm passphrase	Secure the farm used to protect farm; required to join additional resources to the farm
Content Site Template

You may want to download the template as JSON to create another FARM as required for test, stage, acceptance, pre-production, or for any other purpose required by defining the requirements for your environments.