This section discusses various deployment recommendations, as they relate to minimums and maximums for SharePoint Portal Server. We learned earlier that most companies start their portal deployment with a single site workspace with a single dashboard view for end users. We then grow the portal based on the business requirements of your solution. As you plan your deployment, it is important to consider the following growth limitations. Single Server or Small Sites For a single site, you should consider that a single SharePoint Portal Server is limited to one million document versions. When planning your deployment, you should consider the number of levels in the category hierarchy to ensure this limitation is not exceeded. In addition to the limitations of the document versions, a single SharePoint Portal Server is limited to crawling 3.5 million documents. For enterprise solutions that require crawling this number of documents, you would normally employ multiple servers dedicated to the crawling process. When multiple servers are used for crawling content, the server dedicated to searching is less consumed, and therefore better performance can be expected. Lastly, each server has a licensing limitation of 10,000 users per server. However, whether a single server can support 10,000 users simultaneously is a planning task that requires extensive due diligence and performance testing. Multiple Servers or Large Sites Once a single server solution is deployed and operational, you should continually monitor and manage the growth signals, which may indicate that additional sites are required. Reasons to consider additional sites are We learned earlier in this chapter how SharePoint Portal Server could be deployed across many individual sites and aggregated together logically through a single master portal site. The solution requires several servers, some of which are dedicated to crawling, some dedicated to document management, and others dedicated to searching. Indexes from the crawled content are propagated to the search server in order to minimize the impact on server resources for having to create the indexes. |