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Sitecore Installation Assistant (SIA) was first introduced together with Sitecore 9.2. It is great to see that this tool is evolving and in new version it has some new features.

The Sitecore Install Assistant’s user interface guides you through the Sitecore installation. Use it to review system requirements, install prerequisites, and complete the entire installation process without using Sitecore Installation Framework (SIF) directly.

In this latest version, introduced together with Sitecore 9.3, Sitecore has included also installation of Solr and optionally also SXA module so you don’t need to care any more about installing something before / after Sitecore instance like it was before. Of course if you use JSS or other modules you still need to do it 😉

1) Downloading installation files

Compared to Sitecore 9.2 version of SIA, you can use SIA not only to install Sitecore XP Single package (Standalone XP “DEV” Machine) but also for Sitecore XM Scaled package (Scaled XM “DEV” Machine) environment.

There are two download options now for SIA to be used with respective packages:

For purposes of this post and also in most cases (when I am preparing Sitecore DEV machine) I will use XP Single download package. You should probably download the same package if you are not asked to use XM Scaled one.

Unzip the downloaded file and you should see similar folder content:

2) Prerequisites

There is only one prerequisite for running installation wizard (SIA) and that is .NET Framework 4.7.2. You can download and install it from here or just open SIA and it will automatically detect that it is missing and offer you download and install. Restart the machine when installation finishes.

I have run this installation on Windows Server 2016.

3) Configuring Installation

Config has gone trough some reorganization. As there are two types of packages supported, Sitecore split config and made Solr template separate group of parameters and XP Single and XM respectively also.

Only thing you need to change is Solr port if you have already previous version of Solr running on port 8983. I have incremented it by one 🙂

Of course you can tweak site names and their suffixes if you wish.

4) Running Installation

Open installation setup.exe file and welcome screen opens:

Installation prerequisites like Sitecore Install Framework (SIF) and Windows Server prerequisites are installed automatically for you in next screen. You can also skip this step if you have already done it:

Next screen will ask you to provide some details about Solr. I have specified Windows service and path prefix as port was already specified in config in previous step. As Jeremy Davis pointed out in his great blog post, new scripts introduced in latest SIF will install OpenJDK version of Solr and make it private to this installation. SIA is using those SIF scripts in the background. No need to install and use custom PowerShell scripts to install and configure Solr anymore. SIA / SIF will take care. Hurray!

Click Install button or skip if you have already installed Solr 8.1.1:

On next screen, you are specifying Sitecore settings like prefix, admin password and path to license file:

SQL Server settings are following. If you are installing on local with sa account, you only need to specify password for this user. Otherwise make necessary changes:

As I was also installing Solr, I have only checked these values. No need to change anything if not necessary due to your different setup:

Finally! You can install SXA module within SIA assistant just by checking option on next screen. So simple… Awesome!

Summary of the settings you typed in / configured before running installation itself can be seen on Summary screen:

Validation is done on next screen and setup checks whether all that you typed in is correct. Click Next and installation starts. You are ready to see progress of installation:

You can check status by clicking arrow down button on the right:

“Everything is running smoothly” is what you want to see. 🙂

After couple of minutes, all looks good!

Happy to see one of my suggestions I made was implemented already in this version of SIA. Finally “Launch” button on last screen:

Sitecore 9.3 up and running 🙂

Cheers

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