Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Use Intra-Farm Shared Services
Chapter 14: Shared Services 341
Intra-farm shared services can be the answer to the problem with multiple portal
sites we just discussed. It will not help in a situation where multiple non–shared services
portal sites are needed to separate the entities, but it will help alleviate the
resource and management difficulties. Additional portal sites in a farm running
shared services will take up far fewer resources, except for the corporate portal site.
The corporate portal site is the top-level, or parent, portal site of the farm. This portal
site will host all the shared services—search applications, audiences, user profiles,
and My Sites. It will consume roughly the same amount of memory as a non–shared
services portal site. With shared services enabled, you will be able to host up to
100 portal sites on a single server without incurring a performance penalty. Again,
as with non–shared services portal sites, the total number of portal sites per server
that can be hosted ultimately depends on site content and usage.
Note You do not want to enable shared services on a server farm where
there is only one portal site. Because shared services add additional databases
for the shared services data, running shared services with only one
server will actually give you slightly lower performance. You can always enable
shared services later when a second portal site needs to be created.
Administration is easier with shared services also. Because there is only one
location to configure search, audiences, user profiles, and My Sites for the entire
farm, these components are much simpler and faster to manage. Troubleshooting
can be easier as well. Search can be a problematic component of SharePoint Portal
Server to fix when it breaks. Because there is only one search application for the
entire server farm with shared services, there will be only one instance to monitor
and fix, rather than several.
Each portal site will still have its own Site Settings configuration, which will be
the responsibility of the portal site owner to manage, but resource-intensive operations,
such as audience compilation and crawling, will be reserved for farm administrators.
The link for each of these will still show up on the Site Settings page, but
you will get a notice that shared services is enabled and that you will need to contact
the administrator of the corporate portal site, as shown in Figure 14-1.
The end-user experience will be improved with shared services as well. If a user
performs an “All Content Source” search on any portal site in the farm, that user will
get the same search results as if he searched directly from the parent portal site.
When the user visits his My Site, it will be the same no matter what portal site he is
using. This is because the My Site link actually redirects the user to the My Site on the
corporate portal site no matter what portal site he is using, unless you manually designate
a separate personal site portal. You might consider using a separate personal site