Deployment guidance for small, medium and large SharePoint farms
Organizations planning to implement a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 solution must plan for increasing workloads, anticipate changing user requirements and determine how to provide availability for SharePoint sites and services. A server farm deployment model helps ensure that the solution infrastructure is scalable, flexible and resilient to hardware failures. The farm model uses a dedicated database server, employs one or more
application servers and generally distributes Web front-end server roles across multiple hosts.
A smaller SharePoint farm in general is a best choice for small and medium businesses with relatively low concurrent user load. A small SharePoint farm employs:
- A two-tier architecture with all SharePoint Web front-end and application roles hosted on the Web front-end servers
- At the database tier, one or more SQL servers in a failover cluster to enable high availability of SharePoint databases
Learn more here: Designing and Implementing a Small Server Farm with SharePoint 2010
Medium and large SharePoint 2010 farms consist of several servers, each of which is provisioned with different SharePoint components. Dell recommends three-tier architectures that feature:
- A presentation tier that provides Web and search query functions
- An application tier that provides search indexing and service application functions
- A database tier that hosts the SQL Server databases for the farm
Because farms of this scale often contain important data or provide necessary business functions, the farm architecture should be designed with high availability and redundancy in mind.
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