Share Point Topologies

Choosing right topology for share point is very important and tricky part. Architect or consultants have to think of lot factors before doing the right choice. Some of the major factors are Number of users,
Redundancy requirements and Service applications being used.  Depending on these criteria’s consultant can choose right topology for the organization.

SharePoint topologies can categorized in following categories

   Single Server Farm: This topology is ideal for the 100 users. This consists of a single server catering the requirement of the Web Front End (WFE), Database Server and the Application Server.

 

    Two server Farm: This type of the farm is configured with one data base server and one WFE. Database Server and one Web server that performs all the application services. For high availability a clustered or mirrored database server is recommended. This farm can content  100 to20k users

 

Two tier small farm: This farm can hold  to 10k to 20 k users Two Web Servers, one Web Server performing the tasks of the Application Server and the Database Server.

Three-Tier Small Farm : Three-Tier small farm is similar to a Two-Tier Small Farm.  Only things is it have a dedicated Application Server added to serve the requirements of the services. To improve the performance of the Search Service the Search Database can be moved to a dedicated Database server. This Farm Topology is ideal for a solution with a Search Database containing nearly 10 million items which can be considered as a large Search Database.  
Medium Farm: This farm is three tier farms. Generally there could be 10k users per WFE. The first tier we can put two or more web servers. In the Second Tier there are two servers dedicated to crawling contents and serving search queries and one or more servers for all other application services. The third tier contains the dedicated servers for search databases and one

Large Farm: A Large Farm is built on the Server Group concept as it used in the Medium Farm. Additionally a Large Farm could consist of dedicated servers for Sandboxed code, handling incoming requests, search purpose and various application services.