| SharePoint Server Farm Architecture Consulting |
| Expanding your SharePoint installation to a server farm can be a daunting task. Making sure your portal is available and responsive to local and remote users should be a primary concern to any organization. Take advantage of our SharePoint Server Farm Architecture Consultants clustering and failover expertise and avoid the many pitfalls for this type of project. |
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| Server Farm Configuration |
| A server farm configuration has the following characteristics: |
- There are multiple separate servers running Windows SharePoint Services and SQL Server.
- Multiple sites and subsites are grouped in site collections on each virtual server in IIS that is extended with Windows SharePoint Services. An ISAPI filter maps incoming URLs to specific sites on that virtual server.
- Each virtual server has its own set of content databases in SQL Server. The configuration database for the server farm directs each server to the appropriate content database for a given Web site. The content for the top-level Web site and any subsites within a site collection is stored in the same content database.
- Performance and capacity are increased by adding additional servers running Windows SharePoint Services and SQL Server.
- Scaling is achieved by adding more front-end Web servers (to increase throughput for the existing content), and by adding top-level Web sites and subsites (to support more content).
- Load balancing is achieved by using switching and routing hardware, or by using software such as Windows Network Load Balancing Service.
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| The following diagram illustrates the architecture for the Windows SharePoint Services in a server farm configuration. |
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What Is a Server Farm?
Scaling Solutions with Server Farms
Increasing Solution Availability with Server Farms
Increasing Flexibility and Manageability with Server Farms
How our SharePoint Server Farm Architecture Experts can Help |
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| What Is a Server Farm? |
Load balancing
- Two or more networked servers providing a single role or service group to the farm
- Distribute load across multiple servers
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Scalability
- Scale server role out by adding additional servers as needed
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Fault tolerance
- Farm solution continues to service requests in the event of an outage of single server if the role is load-balanced
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| Scaling Solutions with Server Farms |
| Physical bottlenecks |
| Four primary physical resources used in a Web farm: •Temporary Memory (RAM) •Processor (CPU) •Disk Access (Disk I/O Read/Write), •Network Performance (Network and NICs) |
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| Scaling up |
| Increase farm performance by upgrading memory, processors, and/or disks in a single server |
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| Scaling Out |
| Add additional servers to a topology tier/server role in order to distribute and share the workload |
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| Increasing Availability with Server Farms |
| Requirement |
Issues and options |
| Load balancing |
Why load balance?
Hardware or software load balancing? |
| Redundancy |
Multiple servers for a single role
Some server roles cannot be redundant
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| Farm Database Availability |
Mirroring
Clustering
Failover | |
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| Increasing Flexibility and Manageability with Server Farms |
| Incremental expansion |
- Easier to add additional servers (do not need to remove server)
- Diminishing return of improvement when scaling up
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| Managing Upgrades |
- Server can be removed from farm and upgraded
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| Delegated administration |
- Farm Administrators, Server Administrators, and DBAs
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| How our SharePoint Server Farm Architecture Consulting Experts can Help |
| We are able to provide a complete project team, or participate on an as-needed basis if you already have an internal project team and just need to augment the team with an "expert". |
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| Related Links |
| Experts at Sharepoint Branding | SharePoint Custom Web Part Development Experts | SharePoint Onsite Training Consultants | SharePoint Server Farm Architecture Consulting |
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