Scaling SharePoint Portal Server 2003 by Creating Server Farms

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is designed to be scalable to meet the needs of different organizations. A simple installation can use a single server to house the database and manage user access, whereas a more complex installation can separate the database from the SharePoint server to improve performance or for other design considerations such as security. For more complex implementations, the different primary functions of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (web component, index component, and search component) can be divided between different servers.

A small server farm would most likely be configured with

• One SharePoint Portal Server 2003 server

• One SQL 2000 server

A medium server would take the process a step further and could contain

• One front-end web server (with the search component)
  
  
• One index management and job server
  
  
• One server running SQL 2000
  
  

A large server farm could contain

• Two front-end web servers

• Two to four search servers

• One to four index management servers (one of which is the job server)

• One or more servers running SQL Server 2000

Network load balancing enables the servers in a SharePoint Server farm to balance requests between servers to leverage the processing power in place and provide acceptable performance even in times of extreme usage.

The advantages of the different configurations are discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, "Planning and Designing the SharePoint 2003 Infrastructure," and in Chapter 22, "Scaling SharePoint for Enterprise Environments."