SharePoint 2010 Farm Topologies

This post briefly explains the different farm topologies in SharePoint 2010 and explains the roles involved in that topology. SharePoint 2010 can be deployed on single server or multiple servers. The roles involved in SharePoint 2010 farm are

· Web server role

· Application server role

· Database server role

In small farm typically these can be one server or two servers.

Web server role:

1. Web server typically hosts the web pages, web services and web parts to process the requests.

2. It passes the requests to appropriate application servers.

Application server role:

1. Application server roles are related to the services that are in SharePoint

2. Each application service can reside on a dedicated application server

3. Group the client-related services based on usage

Typical components in Application server

· Query component

· Crawl component

· Search administration

· User profile service

· Business Data connectivity

· Web Analytics

The services associated with the above components can be shared over multiple farms.

Typical services that associated with service applications in application server are

1. Excel Calculation service

2. Business Data Connectivity

3. SharePoint server search

4. Performance point service

5. User profile service

6. Web Analytics service

7. Visio graphics service

Database server role:

All databases can be deployed to single server in small farm. In large farms group the databases by roles and deploy them to multiple database servers.

Databases can be categorized as follows

· Search Database (Search admin db, property db and crawl db)

· Content Database

· Service Databases(Business Data connectivity, User Profile, Usage and health data collection and state service etc)

These databases can be shared across the farms depending size and usage.

We can categorize the server topologies as

1. Small farm topology

2. Medium farm topology

3. Large farm topology

Small farm topology example: small farm topology can serve users up to 20000 and can scale out based on how heavily the services are used. The following two are the variances in the topologies

Two-tier farm

Web server with query component	Web server with query component and all other service components
All SharePoint databases

Three-tier farm

 

Web\Query server

Application server

Database servers- Search databases\All other SharePoint databases

 

Medium farm topology example: The medium farm can scale for to serve approx 40 million items. Scale out is based on utilization of service applications and services within the farm.

Web servers

Web servers you can increase the number of web servers based on number of users. Starting point 10,000 users per one web server.

Application servers Query and Crawl servers	Application servers All other application components and services
Database servers Search databases	All other SharePoint databases

Large farm topology examples: In this topology we can group the service applications, services or databases with similar performance characteristics on to dedicated servers.

Web Servers

 

Web server group1	Web server group2
web servers for incoming requests	web servers for crawling and administration

Application  Servers

Application server group1	Application server group2
Crawl servers	Query servers

 

Database Servers

Database server group1	Database server group2
Search databases	Content databases