- Determining Who the Solution Is for and How They Will Use It
- Defining the Goals for the Implementation
- Network Upgrades May Be Required
- Sample Windows SharePoint Services Implementations
- Primary Uses of Windows SharePoint Services
- Sample SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Single Server Implementations
- Sample SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Server Farm Implementations
- Standard Uses of SharePoint Portal Server 2003
- Expanding SharePoint by Integrating with Other Applications
- Leveraging Complementary Microsoft Products with SharePoint 2003
- Leveraging Third-Party SharePoint Add-ons
- Summary
- Best Practices
Sample SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Server Farm Implementations
Other organizations decide to "start big" initially and implement a server farm using SharePoint Portal Server 2003. This section covers several common configurations encountered in the real world.
As mentioned in Chapter 1, there are several different types of server farms, typically classified as small, medium, or large server farms. If an organization will be using SharePoint Portal Server 2003 for production uses, and downtime could cost the organization money and damage its reputation, it makes sense to implement a dedicated SQL 2000 Server and then have one or more separate front-end servers. This allows for the addition of front-end servers for performance or security reasons while allowing the back-end database server to concentrate on managing the SharePoint environment.
Figure 3.5 shows a sample medium server farm with SharePoint Portal Server 2003, which consists of
Two front-end web servers (with the search component)
One index management and job server
Two servers running SQL 2000 (These could be configured as an active/passive cluster.)
Figure 3.5 Sample SharePoint Portal Server 2003 medium server farm.
Increasing the complexity of the configuration might be required if the overall performance of the environment couldn’t meet the demand of the end users, or for added system fault tolerance. As shown in Figure 3.6, dedicated search servers can be configured to remove this function from the front-end web servers.
Figure 3.6 Sample SharePoint Portal Server 2003 large server farm.
A large server farm could contain
Three front-end web servers (These would most likely be load-balanced.)
Two search servers
One job and index server
Two servers running SQL Server 2000 (These could be configured as an active/passive cluster.)