I have been living and breathing SharePoint 2010 PowerShell the past two months.
During this time, I have created PowerShell scripts to prepare the farm, install SharePoint 2010, install and provision all service applications with their custom database names solely with PowerShell. This is on a multi-server SharePoint 2010 environment. So my scripts had to be able to create and join servers to the farm, start relevant services on App servers. No more stsadm for me!

The crawl server (index) was the most interesting as my script creates the Search SA and then modifies it with the specific database names that your variables you provide.

There were some (many) lessons learned and I will write more on that later.
I would like to show you how the SharePoint Products and Technologies Wizard works underneath and then marry those steps with equivalent PowerShell commands….

Here are the steps the SharePoint Products and Technologies Wizard (sometimes referred to the grey wizard) takes to create a new farm:

1. Initializing SharePoint Products configuration…

2. Initiating install check…

3. Installing help collections…

4. Securing the SharePoint resources…

5. Registering SharePoint services…

6. Registering SharePoint features…

7. Provisioning the SharePoint Central Administration  web Application…

8. Installing the application content files…

9. Finalizing the Sharepoint products configuration…

Ok, here are the equivalent commands in PowerShell. Be sure to run them in this order otherwise you may have issues deploying your Search Service Application.
1. Initializing SharePoint Products configuration…

2. Initiating install check…

New-SPConfigurationDatabase -DatabaseName DatabaseName –AdministrationContentDatabaseName AdministrationContentDatabaseName –DatabaseServer SQLServerName -Passphrase Passphrase -FarmCredentials (get-credential)

3. Installing help collections…

Install-SPHelpCollection –All
4. Securing the SharePoint resources…

Initialize-SPResourceSecurity
5. Registering SharePoint services…

Install-SPService
6. Registering SharePoint features…

Install-SPFeature –AllExistingFeatures
7. Provisioning the SharePoint Central Administration  web Application…

New-SPCentralAdministration -Port 44444 -WindowsAuthProvider “ntlm”

8. Installing the application content files…

Install-SPApplicationContent

9. Finalizing the Sharepoint products configuration…
(No equivalent PowerShell cmd)

If you need more help with PowerShell, contact me. My colleague and I have put together a simple GUI tool to build your entire SharePoint 2010 multiserver (or single server) farm! This tool works with the PowerShell scripts I created. If you think your organisation needs an easy PowerShell deployment GUI tool for SharePoint 2010 which runs these PowerShell scripts, please contact me.

Imagine accounting for the time spent waiting for SharePoint to start up in the morning or after a server reboot or an iisreset?

It takes such a long time to load, but after it has loaded, then SharePoint behaves normally. The cause for this is when your Application pool is recycled in IIS. By default it recycles at 2:00AM daily.

The best way to ‘Warm Up’ SharePoint is to run some scripts that would fire up SharePoint in the wee hours of the morning. Read more on how to get this script..

Click here to download warmupserver.zip

warmupserver.zip contains the following 3 files:

Startup.bat – Calls the warmupserver.cmd script and passes in the servername parameter (modify this to fit the hostname of your server)

Warmupserver.cmd – checks for servername parameter then leverages the HttpRequest.vbs script to hit the relevant admin pages (change the pages and ports to the relevant ones)

HTTPRequest.vbs - This script executes an HTTP query using the XMLHTTP object

Read more here: http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2006/08/13/697044.aspx

Please contact me if you want any topics that interest you.