SharePoint 2007: The Definitive Guide
by James Pyles, Christopher M. Buechler, Bob Fox, Murray Gordon, Michael Lotter, Jason Medero, Nilesh Mehta, Joris Poelmans, Christopher Pragash, Piotr Prussak, Christopher J. Regan
Topologies
In previous versions of SharePoint, we were provided with different size farms. Small farms (Figure 4-2) could consist of one WFE, the Application Server Role, and Database server all residing on the same box. Alternatively, it could be branched out to two servers. The frontend servers are designated as web servers and provide web content to clients, and the Application Server Role provides services such as Excel Services, Business Data Catalog, search queries, crawling, and indexing content. This model typically is fine for a small organization, but its suitability will really suffer when we start to look at fault tolerance and recoverability. This is where the medium to large farms come into play. Not only do the larger farms assist in spreading some of the load, but you can also gain some fault tolerance benefits with these models.

Figure 4-2. Small farm topology
A medium server farm (Figure 4-3) typically consists of a database server, an application server running Office SharePoint Server 2007, and one or two frontend web servers running Office SharePoint Server 2007 and IIS. In this configuration, the application server provides indexing services and Excel Calculation Services, and the frontend web servers service search queries and provide web content.

Figure 4-3. Medium ...
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