Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Single Server
Server Farms
Chapter 5: SharePoint Portal Server Architecture 119
In a single-server configuration, all components (both front-end and back-end) are
on a single server. This configuration can use a separate installation of SQL Server or
use SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine for the back-end databases.
Server farms are created in a SharePoint Portal Server environment when components
are placed on separate servers. Server farms can range from small to large,
depending on the needs of the environment.
The components that are considered front-end are the Web server hosting the
portal site, the index server crawling the content and creating the index, the search
server that processes client search requests, and the job server that coordinates available
services. A small server farm keeps the front-end components on the same
server while separating the back-end databases onto one or more servers. Medium
server farms separate the indexing functions and the job server from the front-end
Web servers and search services. A large farm can handle up to four index management
servers, one of which must be a job server, and four search servers, which are
separate from the Web front-end servers. To find out more about deploying server
farms, see the chapters in Part 4, “Deployment Scenarios.”
Personal Sites vs. My Site
Personal sites and the My Site feature are separate features that are both available
only in SharePoint Portal Server. Although the names of these two features are often
used as synonyms for each other, they are not the same. Site administrators need a
good understanding of the architectural differences between the two features to
understand differences in the behavior of each.
Personal sites are Windows SharePoint Services sites that are created for individual
users. Every user who has the Create Personal Site right can have a personal
site. By default, the location of a user’s personal site is portalname/personal/username,
where portalname is the name of the portal and username is the name of the
individual user.
My Site is a single page located in the SharePoint Portal Server site. By default,
the path for this page is portalname/My Site/default.asp, where portalname is the
name of the portal. Every user who accesses the My Site URL downloads the same
page. However, users often don’t realize this because some of the information on
the page is personalized based on the user’s profile information and information
from the user’s personal site.
So the difference between My Site and personal sites is that My Site is the portal
page through which all users must pass to get to their own personal site. A user links
to his personal site through the My Site page. It is hard to recognize that the My Site