Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

320 Part IV: Deployment Scenarios
Planning for Scale
■ The front-end Web servers must be configured as Web servers (running
Internet Information Services in IIS 6.0 worker process isolation mode)
and must be running ASP.NET. For more information about installing
and configuring IIS and ASP.NET, see the Windows Server 2003 Family
documentation.
■ The front-end Web servers must be using the NTFS file system. Microsoft Windows
includes a conversion utility (Convert.exe) that you can use to convert
an existing file allocation table (FAT) volume to NTFS—without losing data.
■ The back-end servers must be running Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Service
Pack 3 or later.
Note It is not required to have a dedicated SQL server in smaller deployments.
Smaller organizations might choose to run a number of services on
one machine, including Windows SharePoint Services and SQL. On the other
hand, for large deployments you might want to have multiple SQL servers to
balance the load across servers.
■ The client computers must be running Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or later (with
the best results coming from Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or later) or Netscape
Navigator 6.2 or later to use Windows SharePoint Services website features.
You can use the same front-end Web server to host both your intranet and extranet
virtual servers, or you can split them across two separate servers. If you anticipate a
heavy load on either your intranet or extranet, you should use separate front-end
Web servers for each environment so that heavy use of your extranet server does not
affect the availability of your intranet server and vice versa. This section describes the
steps you need to take to use separate front-end Web servers for each environment.
You can also use multiple front-end Web servers to host both virtual servers, as in a
standard server farm, to reduce potential downtime.
An important performance feature of Windows SharePoint Services is the ability
to load balance across Web front-end servers, which will make the most of a server
farm environment. Windows SharePoint Services works with most standard loadbalancing
methods available. Each method has its own set of pros and cons relative
to cost, processing power, and scale. You can use any of the following methods with
Windows SharePoint Services:
■ Software solutions, such as Network Load Balancing. Software, such as
Network Load Balancing (NLB) services in Windows Server 2003. This method is
inexpensive but offers only limited scalability. NLB runs on the Web front-end