Installing K2
When upgrading or performing maintenance on your K2 environment, first:
- Ensure there are no dependency issues in your solutions. See Dependency Checking for information about dependencies and how to resolve dependency issues.
- Backup your K2 database
- Create a checkpoint (snapshot) if K2 is running in a virtual environment
When creating a new environment for purposes of testing, it is best practice to create a new environment and not clone an existing environment as cloning an environment can cause unexpected behavior.
Installing the K2 product suite components can involve a number of separate installs on different machines, depending on the topology you have selected for your deployment. The topics in this section of the Installation guide describe how to install K2.
You may need to disable antivirus software before you install or upgrade K2. Some antivirus software may cause blocking or performance issues when running the K2 product installation.
| Topic Section | Contents |
|---|---|
| Installation Tools and Utilities | The Setup Manager is the primary tool used to install K2. This section describes the setup manager in more detail, as well as describing other tools used to install components of K2. |
| K2 Five: Simple Single-server Installation | This section describes how to install K2 in its simplest form: on a single server. |
| K2 Distributed Installation | A distributed installation is one where components of K2 are installed on different servers in a distributed network environment. A Farm installation is where K2 server components are installed on physically separate machines that act as one logical application server. These topics describe how to install K2 in distributed or Farm topologies. |
| Unattended Installations | Unattended installation uses an XML file to install K2 in an automated fashion. There is minimal interaction by administrators or technicians during the setup process. This section describes how to perform an unattended installation. |
| Non-AD Installation | This section describes the installation of K2 on a machine in workgroup mode, with all server and client components included. This installation might be used when installing on a VM hosted in Azure and not joined to an AD domain, for example. |
| K2 for SharePoint App Deployment | The App Deployment tool can be used to deploy the K2 Five for SharePoint app to your App Catalog manually. |
When installing K2 components to your environment, it is very important to follow the specified order of events to ensure a successful installation.
The following installation packages are available, and can be downloaded from the Nintex Customer Central Portal.
- K2 Five installer: use the installer to do either a full, or a custom install on a system with no previous K2 installation. If the K2 Five installer detects K2 Blackpearl 4.7 on your system, it starts the Update Manager so that you can update to K2 Five. You use the same installer to do maintenance on your K2 Five environment.
For information on what versions of K2 can be upgraded to other versions of K2, please see the Product Compatibility, Integration and Support matrix.
Considerations
- If SharePoint 2013 or later is detected in your environment, there will be an option to launch the K2 App deployment on the last page of the K2 Setup Manager
- In a distributed SharePoint environment, you must run the AppDeployment.exe on each web front-end.