Setting up a SharePoint Farm with Local Account credentials

If you have ever tried setting up a SharePoint 2010 Farm with local account credentials, you probably know that this cannot be done any longer as was the case with SharePoint 2007. 

Fortunately, Microsoft provided a back door to the limitation of the GUI interface courtesy of our very good friend PowerShell.

The PowerShell command is New-SPConfigurationDatabase.  This command will set up the configuration database for you and even prompt you for the necessary local account credentials.  Once the Configuration database has been created, you can proceed with the Server Farm installation by connecting to an existing Farm.

Here are some good articles that include screenshots on just how to accomplish this:

NOTE: Since the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell does not work on Windows Server 2012, you will have run this script in PowerGUI.  Below is a sample PowerShell script to do this.

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

$userName = "Administrator"

$password = "mypassword"

$SPPassword = "mysppassword"

$FarmPassword = ConvertTo-SecureString -String $password -AsPlainText $true

$Passphrase = ConvertTo-SecureString -String $SPPassword -AsPlainText $true

#Write-Host $FarmPassword

#Write-Host $Passphrase

#Create the Farm credential object

$FarmCredential = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential $userName, $FarmPassword

#Create the new SharePoint Configuration Database

New-SPConfigurationDatabase -DatabaseName "SharePoint_Config" -DatabaseServer "WIN2012SP2010" -FarmCredentials $FarmCredential -Passphrase $Passphrase

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/fromthefield/lists/posts/post.aspx?id=112

http://www.dev4side.com/community/blog/2010/5/2/how-to-install-sharepoint-2010-with-a-local-account.aspx

If you want the SharePoint People Picker to work with the local user accounts, make sure you run this PowerShell Script (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.administration.sppeoplepickersettings.allowlocalaccount.aspx):

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration")

$peoplePicker = New-Object ("Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPPeoplePickerSettings")

Write-Host $peoplePicker.AllowLocalAccount

$peoplePicker.AllowLocalAccount = $true

Write-Host $peoplePicker.AllowLocalAccount