Sample SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Server Farm Implementations

Other organizations decide to "start big" initially and implement a server farm using SharePoint Portal Server 2003. This section covers several common configurations encountered in the real world.

TIP

Consider using VMware or Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005 software for proof of concept testing for more complex SharePoint implementations. Often a SharePoint server farm can be replicated on a single server using virtual server images, which greatly reduces the costs involved in proof of concept testing. In addition, snapshots of the virtual server images can be taken during the testing process, which facilitates rollbacks and testing different configurations.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, there are several different types of server farms, typically classified as small, medium, or large server farms. If an organization will be using SharePoint Portal Server 2003 for production uses, and downtime could cost the organization money and damage its reputation, it makes sense to implement a dedicated SQL 2000 Server and then have one or more separate front-end servers. This allows for the addition of front-end servers for performance or security reasons while allowing the back-end database server to concentrate on managing the SharePoint environment.

Figure 3.5 shows a sample medium server farm with SharePoint Portal Server 2003, which consists of

• Two front-end web servers (with the search component)

• One index management and job server

• Two servers running SQL 2000 (These could be configured as an active/passive cluster.)

Figure 3.5. Sample SharePoint Portal Server 2003 medium server farm.

Increasing the complexity of the configuration might be required if the overall performance of the environment couldn't meet the demand of the end users, or for added system fault tolerance. As shown in Figure 3.6, dedicated search servers can be configured to remove this function from the front-end web servers.

Figure 3.6. Sample SharePoint Portal Server 2003 large server farm.

A large server farm could contain

• Three front-end web servers (These would most likely be load-balanced.)

• Two search servers

• One job and index server

• Two servers running SQL Server 2000 (These could be configured as an active/passive cluster.)