| The challenge is to determine how many servers are needed, whether services should be partitioned across multiple servers within the same site, and whether multiple servers should be distributed across various geographical locations. It is always a good idea to start with a single site portal and then scale the solution to address specific departmental or business unit requirements. You want to start considering multiple sites if your organization has large groups of users spread out across many sites, separated by a slow network link. Another factor that may impact your decision to consider multiple sites is if your solution requires separate functional goals. For example, some large sites may require their own search server to allow acceptable performance for enterprise searches. Furthermore, some departments or business units may require their own divisional workspace or team collaboration environment. While a single server can accommodate multiple workspaces on the same server, individual servers may be needed to accommodate acceptable performance. Lastly, some departments or business units may require their own server due to logical or political organizational requirements. With SharePoint Portal Server, you could deploy a solution across many servers and many sites and link them together to provide one integrated enterprise portal solution. These multiple sites could be deployed across your distributed enterprise, and then one master search portal could be deployed to search internal portal sites, Web sites, file servers, and other resources that are capable of being crawled. You should also consider multiple sites if single site boundaries are exceeded. In general, a single SharePoint Portal Server can store up to one million document versions. You should carefully plan your category hierarchy to make sure the one million document version limit is not exceeded. SharePoint Portal Server can crawl up to 3.5 million documents to be included in the index. It is recommended that you consider multiple servers dedicated for crawling content if the site is a large search-oriented site. Doing this will reduce the load on the search server and allow optimal performance for searches, without being impacted by a performance degradation of the crawling process in the background. | 
