Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 12
Deploying Medium and
Large Server Farms
Topologies
In this chapter:
Topologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
This chapter discusses how to deploy a medium or large server farm. The majority
of the chapter consists of step-by-step instructions that can be used as a guide for
deploying a farm. This chapter does not cover how to determine which type of farm
to use in given situations. For that type of information, please refer to Chapter 9,
“Capacity Planning.”
This chapter should be viewed as a getting-started guide for building a medium
or large server farm. It will cover everything necessary for building both a medium
server farm and a larger server farm. It will also contain instructions for how to
migrate from a medium farm to a large farm.
Many permutations of topologies can be built using Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal
Server 2003, but only a small number of these topologies are supported by
Microsoft. The simplest topologies are the single-server and small-server-farm topologies,
which have been covered in previous chapters.
Medium and large server-farm topologies can get much more complex. A
medium server topology requires at a minimum one front-end Web server running the
search application, one index/job server running SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and
one database server running Microsoft SQL Server 2000 with Service Pack 3a or later.
Additional servers can be added to this topology to enable higher availability, higher
capacity, or both, but you cannot have a medium farm with fewer than four servers.
Several topologies are not supported by Microsoft. When you install one of these
topologies, it will appear to function—that is, you can create the topology on the
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