Deployment Options

There are many issues to consider for capacity planning. Not every statistic is relevant to your deployment scenario. Some issues to consider include:

• When you expand your deployment by adding workspaces to a single server, the additional server load due to increased user activity can cause unacceptable user performance. What is the maximum user activity your server can support?
• The more documents you have, the longer it takes to propagate the index. When is an index too large to propagate efficiently?
• Use of the document management features consumes hard disk space at a fast rate if there is high document versioning activity.

Hard disk space, network, and CPU costs are associated with specific tasks. You must determine which configurations provide the most beneficial user experience. Similarly, there are benefits to increasing specific resources. You must identify which resources could have the greatest impact in your environment.

SharePoint Portal Server is a flexible and efficient solution that can provide portal services to thousands of users. Depending on your organization, you may want to deploy SharePoint Portal Server on one server or on multiple servers.

Deploying a Single Server

Most organizations initially plan for deploying a portal from a single server. Many organizations often address growth and geographical distribution issues after the initial deployment. The following general recommendations apply if you are planning to deploy SharePoint Portal Server on a single server:

• 1 million document versions stored. A single SharePoint Portal Server computer can store 1 million document versions. You must make choices about several deployment details (such as the extent of the category hierarchy) to achieve, or exceed, this metric. For information about the performance characteristics of such a site, see the Detailed Recommendations section in this chapter.
• 3.5 million documents included in the index. A single SharePoint Portal Server computer can crawl 3.5 million documents. A large, search-oriented site would typically employ several servers dedicated to crawling content to remove the load of crawling content from the server dedicated to searching. For more information, see the Detailed Recommendations section in this chapter.
• 10,000 licensed users per server. Estimating the number of licensed users that a specific server can support is difficult. For many common deployment scenarios, it is possible to support 10,000 licensed users with a single SharePoint Portal Server computer. For information about estimating user support levels, see the Hardware Requirements section in this chapter.

If your implementation exceeds the recommended boundaries shown, you may want to deploy additional servers in one or more geographical locations.

Deploying Multiple Servers

Many organizations can benefit from deploying several servers. Reasons for considering multiple server deployments include:

• Geographic user dispersion separated by slow network connections.
• Differing functional goals such as team collaboration, business unit and divisional workspaces and enterprise search servers.
• Distinct organizational goals such as manufacturing, marketing, sales, finance, etc.

SharePoint Portal Server makes it easy to deploy several different servers within an organization and have them all work together to help users find information.

A common approach for larger organizations is to deploy multiple servers for various geographic regions. Later, the organization may provide an additional master search portal. This master portal makes it possible to search over all geographic portals, file servers, Web sites, and other resources.