The SharePoint Foundation 2010 setup guide is being provided in multiple parts to best organize the installation and configuration process. Certain parts of the guide will not apply to your intended setup, so skip those parts. This guide, in completion, will provide all the needed steps to setup SharePoint Foundation 2010 on a stand-alone Windows Web Server 2008 R2 installation with Forms-Based Authentication not using Active Directory.

To use this guide, you will need a copy of Windows Web Server 2008 R2. It doesn’t matter if it is a retail copy or downloaded from MSDN/TechNet, just be sure to have a legit copy.

For the server to install SharePoint you can use a physical machine, a virtual machine, or your workstation. Installing SharePoint Server on a workstation (running Windows 7 or Windows Vista) will be covered in a separate guide. If you are using a physical machine, skip this section on setting up a virtual machine.

When considering the hardware resources required for SharePoint Foundation, visit this Microsoft TechNet Article (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288751(office.14).aspx).

SharePoint Foundation can be setup in any virtual machine software that supports the 64-bit architecture. This includes VMWare, VirtualBox, and Hyper-V. Packages such as Windows Virtual PC do not support 64-bit guest operating systems. For this guide, I will be using Microsoft Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2. If you are using another virtualization software, you can review this section for comparing the settings I used in Hyper-V or simply skip to the next part.

Setting Up Hyper-V

1. In the Hyper-V Manager, start the wizard to create a new virtual machine and select Next on the Before You Begin step.
2. Provide a Name for the virtual machine. If you wish to store the configuration files for this virtual machine in a different location, you can do so on this step.
3. Specify the amount of RAM for the virtual machine. My Hyper-V host only has 4GB of RAM, so I only used half of that (2GB). If you plan to use this environment for a production website (instead of simply a development environment) you will want to allocate more RAM.
4. Specify the virtual network adapter that this virtual machine will access the network through. By default, there is only one adapter to choose from.
5. Specify the location and size of the virtual hard disk. Please note that you should have the space available on location you select to store the virtual hard disk file. The file will not automatically take up the space allocated, but will instead only take up what is being used within the virtual hard drive.
6. Specify the location of the Windows Web Server 2008 R2 media. I used the ISO file downloaded from MSDN.
7. After completing the wizard, Start the virtual machine and Connect to it.

Now that the virtual machine has been configured, move on to Part 2 to install and configure Windows Web Server 2008 R2.