SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Architect's Guidebook

10

SharePoint 2010 Platform Architectures

By Bill Baer

A properly planned SharePoint topology is of primary importance to delivering a stable, scalable, available, and high-performing SharePoint environment. The process of planning a server farm environment includes many factors — including workload/scenario, business continuity management requirements, demand, and overall business requirements — both for today and in the future. Designing the right server farm environment for your scenario will go a long way toward ensuring that the environment meets the demands of your organization today, and will seamlessly scale in the future.

This chapter discusses the various components associated with a SharePoint 2010 Products topology, their characteristics, and how these components can be implemented to ensure meaningful deployment suitable for meeting existing and future demand.

SERVER FARM TOPOLOGIES

Server farms represent the topology that delivers SharePoint services to end users. A server farm is a collection of server machines acting together to provide a single solution or service.

SharePoint 2010 provides a high degree of flexibility when it comes to planning your topology. The core principle behind implementing a server farm is to enable elastic scale in the event the environment is required to support additional workloads, scenarios, or load. Server farms in SharePoint 2010 are implemented by establishing a base topology.

The core components of a server farm environment include ...