Sitecore 9.3 Quick Installation Guide using Sitecore Install Assistant (SIA)

Sitecore Experience Platform 9.3 Initial Release

Sitecore 9.3 Initial Release was on Nov 2019. In this post, I will walk you through quick installation of this version of Sitecore for your development machine using SIA. I will walk through the problem, which I faced during installation also.

Easiness and smoothness of Sitecore installations are improving each version. With Sitecore 9.2 you have two official options supported by Sitecore to install on your local dev machine:

1.     SIF (Sitecore Installation Framework) : which is used to install Sitecore starting version 9

2.     SIA (Sitecore Install Assistant): New graphical installation coming with Sitecore 9.2.

You will find in this blog post:

        A)    Choosing a topology

        B)    Sitecore 9.3 Prerequisites

        C)    Installation preparation tasks

        D)   Sitecore 9.3 Installation

        E)     Troubleshooting 

A)  Choosing a topology

Before you install Sitecore Experience Platform, you must choose the topology or the type of instance that you want to install.

Sitecore supports the following topologies for on-premise installations by default:

·        XP Single Developer (XP0)

·        XM Scaled (XM1)

·        XP Scaled (XP1)

In this blog, I am going to describes how to install the XP Single Developer topology. Download required topology from Sitecore Official Site.

B)    Sitecore 9.3 Prerequisites

You don’t need to install all these prerequisites (like Sitecore older version) by yourself. Sitecore 9.3 installation package will check and install all prerequisites for you. I just put all prerequisites here for reference.

1.     Operating System

These operating systems are supported:

•    Windows Server 2019

•    Windows Server 2016

•    Windows 10 (64-bit)

2.     .NET requirements

·        Sitecore Experience Platform 9.3.0 requires .NET Framework 4.7.2.

·        Sitecore Identity server requires .NET Core 2.1.12 Windows Hosting Module.

·        You must apply any available updates to the .NET Framework on every Sitecore installation.

3.     Hardware requirements

To run a single Sitecore installation, the minimum configuration requirements are:

·        4 core processor

·        16 GB of RAM

4.     IIS requirements

Sitecore Experience Platform can be hosted on the following IIS versions:

·        IIS 10.0

5.     Database

Sitecore Experience Platform 9.3.0 supports the following database servers:

·        Microsoft SQL Server 2016 SP2 and 2017 : This is required if you are going to use SQL Server for the Experience Database (xDB).

·        MongoDB Server 4.0.5 : This is required if you are going to use MongoDB for the Experience Database (xDB) or as a Session State Provider.

           Note: Do not forget to enable contained databases in MS SQL Server!

In order to enable contained databases on SQL Server, run this SQL script through SQL Server Management Studio:

EXEC sp_configure ‘contained’, 1;

6.     Search indexing requirements

 Sitecore Experience Platform 9.3.0 supports the following search providers:

·        Solr 8.1.1 : Solr is the default search provider and supports both content search and analytics search

·        Azure Search : The Azure Search provider is supported and recommended for Azure Cloud PaaS deployments only.

7.     Installing Solr

The standard Sitecore Experience Platform configuration requires Solr 8.1.1. The Sitecore Experience

Platform is secure by default, you must, therefore, enable SSL for Solr.

Before you run the Sitecore Installation Framework, you must:

• Install Solr and configure it to run as a Windows service.

• Enable and set up SSL for Solr. 

Note: Support for Lucene has been removed in Sitecore Experience Platform 9.3.0.

8.     PowerShell

·        Microsoft PowerShell® version 5.1 or later is required.

To quickly check, you can always open a PowerShell command prompt and run the following command:

$PSVersionTable.PSVersion

9.     SIF

·        Sitecore Experience Platform 9.3.0 requires SIF 2.2.0. 

C)   Installation preparation tasks

Download the Sitecore Install Assistant from official site.

To download the Sitecore Install Assistant:

1 . After you download the file, unpack SIA and store it on the computer where you want to install Sitecore XP.

The package includes:

• setup.exe - the SIA executable file.

• JSON configuration files.

• ZIP program files.

2.     If you want to install Sitecore at a different webroot location then open Sitecore.exe.config file and add you desired webroot location as below.

<template name="XPSingle" path=".\XP0-SingleDeveloper.json">

              <parameter name="SitePhysicalRoot" value="H:\Inetpub\wwwroot\Sitecore9.0\Website" />

3.     Review prerequisites and requirements

SIA requires .NET Framework 4.7.2.

Before you use SIA to install a Sitecore XP Developer topology, you must:

• Install SQL Server.

• Install all the operating system updates.

• Have a valid Sitecore license file.

• Ensure that your computer meets the minimum hardware requirements.

For more information, see Server requirements. 

D)  Sitecore 9.3 Installation - install Single Developer XP0

·        Go to the folder where you unpacked SIA.

·        Right-click setup.exe and then click Run as administrator.

·        Review the information on the Welcome page and click Start.

·        SIA guides you through the installation process.

Follow the screen as below.

1.     Click on start button

2.     This optional page installs the SIF. If you already have SIF installed, click Skip. Otherwise, click on install.  

 3.     This optional page installs the Solr search provider. If you already have Solr 8.1.1 installed, click Skip. Otherwise, enter the appropriate information on the page and click Install.

4.     The Sitecore settings including the installation prefix, the administrator password, and the location of the Sitecore license file.

5.     The Microsoft SQL Server settings including the instance name, the admin user name, and the admin password.

6.     The Solr settings including the service URL, the file system root, and the name of the Solr Windows service.

7.     The optional Sitecore modules that you can install. Currently, Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) is the only available module.

8.     Review the information on this page and ensure that no changes are required. To make some changes, click Back.

9.     This page checks that all the requirements are installed and configured correctly. If all requirements are in place, click Install.

10.A summary of the installation process. An error terminates the installation process. To review the installation process errors, as well as any errors that occurred, click Log.

11.Upon successful completion , browse Sitecore login URL and open Sitecore Launchpad.

 E)    Troubleshooting- Issue faced while installation

1.     If you are facing below error while installation it means you have not setup SSL correctly for Solr. Revalidate and setup correctly to resolve the issue.

Error: [XConnectSolr_UnloadCores [1]]:[Requesting] https://localhost:8990/solr

[2/5] Request Failed: The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel.

2.     Check the correct Sitecore webroot location path to resolve below error.

3.     If you are facing below issue and your SIF DLLs are already at said location then you have missed to “Unblock Framework” of SIF zip file.

Error: Could not load file or assembly 'file:///C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\SitecoreInstallFramework\lib\Microsoft.Web.XmlTransform.dll' or one of its dependencies. Operation is not supported. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131515)

The 'Install-SitecoreConfiguration' command was found in the module 'SitecoreInstallFramework', but the module could not be loaded. For more information, run 'Import-Module SitecoreInstallFramework'.

I hope above installation guide and troubleshooting steps will helpJ