Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

192 Part III: Planning and Deployment
Load-Balanced Medium Server Farm
A load-balanced medium server farm is the first topology where SharePoint Portal
Server really starts to scale out. In this scenario, there are four servers: two loadbalanced
front-end servers running the Web and search components, a dedicated
indexing server, and a server running SQL Server. This topology performs well and
can support many more users than a small server farm, but there is still no highavailability.
This scenario would be used by small organizations with very heavy
usage of their portal site or organizations with up to 50,000 users who have light to
moderate usage of their intranet. Figure 9-2 depicts a load-balanced medium server
farm topology infrastructure.
Front-End/
Search Server
Ethernet Network
Front-End/
Search Server
Index Server
SQL Server
F09XR02
Figure 9-2 Load-balanced medium server farm topology infrastructure
Hardware Recommendations
The reference configuration for a load-balanced medium server farm deployment
used throughout the chapter are given in the following paragraphs.
For a combination of a front-end Web server with a search server (2 Servers),
the following configuration was used:
■ 1 x 2.4-GHz Pentium-4 processor
■ 1-GB main memory expandable to 4 GB
■ Embedded ATA-100 IDE controller
■ 2 x 40-GB IDE ATA-100 disks
■ Embedded 10/100/1000-GB Ethernet interface card (NIC)
For SQL Server, the following configuration was used:
■ 1 x 2.4-GHz Pentium-4 processor
■ 1-GB main memory expandable to 4 GB