Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

340 Part IV: Deployment Scenarios
will have its own search applications—catalogs, content sources, search scopes, and
crawling schedules—as well as its own My Site directories and audiences.
The benefit of multiple non–shared services portal sites is that each portal site
is a completely separate entity. This scenario might be useful for partner extranets,
where you want no connection to your corporate portal site. In such a scenario, you
would want partners to have access to controlled information about your company.
For example, giving partners access to the corporate portal site would give them
access to see public My Sites of any user of the portal site. If you just want to give
partners access to contact information for specific users of your company, you
would need to have a completely separate portal site for partners (or even separate
portal sites for each partner) or get very deep into changing permissions on public
My Sites on the corporate portal site.
The major disadvantage of multiple non–shared services portal sites is that
additional administrative effort and administrative costs are incurred. It is difficult to
manage multiple discrete portal sites, as each additional site takes more time to set
up, configure, and maintain. Each portal site has different settings, and keeping
track of what settings each site has can be daunting and time consuming for the
SharePoint Portal Server administrator. Depending on the number of non–shared
services portal sites, you might need to share the burden of administration among
multiple server administrators. This will add cost as well. Also, having multiple non–
shared services portal sites can be confusing for users who have accounts on each
of those portal sites—for example, a salesperson who has an account on the corporate
portal site as well as on the partner portal site. That user will have a different My
Site on each portal site and will get different search results on each portal site. These
factors should be taken into consideration.
The other increased cost of running multiple non–shared services portal sites is
resources. A single-server environment with 4 GB of RAM can host up to 10 non–
shared services portal sites without incurring a performance penalty. The amount of
content in the portal site and the site’s peak usage will ultimately determine how
many non–shared services portal sites can be hosted on a single server. If usage is
light, up to 10 non–shared services portal sites can be hosted, but if usage of all the
portal sites is heavy, you should not run more than 4 or 5 non–shared services portal
sites. To increase the capacity of the farm, additional machines must be purchased
and the farm must be reconfigured. Both are costly ventures, requiring skillful planning
to ensure minimal downtime. In addition, much data will be stored multiple
times. Audience compilation and user profiles will be stored in a separate database
for each portal site, so any information that is present in multiple portal sites will be
stored multiple times. Search catalogs will be built on a per–portal site basis, meaning
that if any content source, such as company press releases, is present in more
than one portal site, it is indexed in both the corporate portal site and the partner
portal site. That same content will be crawled twice, taking up processor time, and
it will be stored in two different catalogs, taking up twice the space.