Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

218 Part III: Planning and Deployment
In the common medium server farm, each function is implemented on redundant
servers, with the exception of the indexing and job server functions. (There can
be only one index and job server per farm.) Even the failure of the index and job
server does not immediately affect availability because the search services are still
available to end users. However, no indexing of new content is possible until the
index and job server becomes available.
In the medium server farm solution, the front-end Web servers also host the
search components for the farm. Consequently, the performance of the front-end
Web servers is predicated on their ability to respond to end-users’ requests to serve
pages and to respond to search queries.
You can scale a base-line medium server farm by using one of the following
two methods:
■ Adding a front-end Web and search server to the Network Load Balancing cluster,
thereby increasing the capacity and availability
Note In a medium server farm, you cannot add dedicated search servers,
nor can you add index and job servers. To add such servers, you must
deploy the large server farm. However, you can scale from a medium server
farm to a large server farm after initial deployment.
■ Deploying the medium server farm with a separate dedicated Windows Share-
Point Services farm to host SharePoint Portal Services sites
The five-server medium-server farm configuration was tested by applying a
typical usage workload. This workload contains a mix of typical user functions as
might be used on each of the four main types of portal sites or websites: Corporate,
Divisional, Team Sites, and My Sites. This workload and the results obtained with it
are considered to be representative of a majority of users and business usage. If a
specific customer’s workload differs substantially from the workload used, results
and supported throughput for the various functions will vary from those presented
here. Testing will give information for how to take such workload differences into
consideration and how to estimate expected performance.
The tested highly available medium server farm with a SQL cluster (the configuration
for which was stated previously in this chapter) provided a sustained
throughput rate of 110 operations per second, where an operation corresponds to a
portal function—for example browse, search, or open document—at an average
CPU consumption of 80 percent on each of the 2 Network Load Balancing (NLB)
Web front-end servers. The average CPU consumption of the active computer running
SQL Server was approximately 35 percent (2 × 2.8 GHz CPUs). This indicates a
4 to 1 ratio between front-end Web server processors and SQL Server processors. A