Deployment Planning and Topologies in SharePoint 2010
With in the scope of this document will discuss some of the basic recommendations and some of the best practices when performing an design and deployment of a SharePoint farm to fulfill a given business requirement. However details in this article can get change based on the business requirement. When planning a topology for a farm there are several factors to be consider based on number of requests, Types of services, main business focus and amount of content going to be used. By considering these factors and their relationships can assign several SharePoint roles accordingly such as number of WFE servers, Application servers, distribution of services on dedicated servers, number of database servers, distribution of databases such as dedicated database for high usage services...etc.
Following are some of the basic best practices to be consider when Design and Deploying a SharePoint 2010 farm to full fill a given business need.
Limited- Server Farm Deployment
A ) Single Server
1) Only for Training and Testing purposes
2) Support up to 100 users
3) All the server roles are deployed in single node (web, application and database)
B) Two server farm
1) Web and Application server roles are deployed in a single server
2) Database role is in another server
3) Can support up to 10,000 users
Small Farm deployment
A) Two - Tier topology
a) The above will have two tiers with 3 servers.
b) Important thing here is query components were deployed in web server roles also with Application server.
B) Three Tier Topology optimized for search
a) This will have dedicated Application server, due to the fact that moderate service usage is expected.
b) Also there exists a dedicated database for search to optimize the usage
c) This will support up to 10 million users.
Medium Farm Deployment
a) In general this will optimized for search for up to 40 million individual items Each of the services will going to provide by different server roles should be scaled based on amount of content and growth rate
b) If the search volume will going to get extend then deploying another search farm will help to keep the requirements aligned.
c) In general the number of web servers going to add to this medium farm will depend on expected number of users for this.
d) As a rule of thumb I assume 1 web server for every 10,000 users with proper resource utilization of hardware requirements will provide perfect expected performances in Web Front End level.
Large Farm deployments
a) If anyone thinking about this, then the service utilization requirements which includes search are in highest enterprise level.
b) Therefore the best practice would be to group services and associated databases based on their characteristics.
c) For an example group of web servers to manage incoming requests and another set for crawling and administration
d) In general the key concept of the above topology is to have more dedicate set of servers for same characteristics.