Scaling a SharePoint 2013 installation requires planning for the distribution of service applications across the farm environment. Because each implementation differs in terms of the amount of data, services offered, and users supported, no single topology is appropriate for any given business.
The following topologies are by no means the only ones available, but they give guidance as topology starting farms for your design.
Smallest (practical) fault tolerant farm
In this farm type, each tier (web, application, and data) must provide fault tolerance. At the web tier, user requests are distributed across both servers using server load balancing (hardware- or software-based). The application layer servers each run all required service application roles.
IMPORTANT COMBINING THE WEB AND APPLICATION TIERS
Although you could technically collapse the web and application tiers into two servers instead of the four specified, performance would suffer considerably as demand increases for the services provided by the application tier.
The data tier for this farm is load balanced using Clustering, Mirroring, or SQL2012 AlwaysOn technologies (Availability Groups, Mirroring, or Clustering). All three tiers are shown in Figure 1-30.
FIGURE 1-30 Smallest fault tolerant farm.
Search optimized farm
In a SharePoint environment that maintains a lot of content, search traffic can begin to produce a lot of traffic on the web servers. Segmenting the Crawl, Query, and Index components can improve the user experience, moving the search-centric activities onto dedicated servers.
In this configuration, a new web server is dedicated to the Crawl component in the web tier and the Query/Index components are moved onto their own fault tolerant server set (see Figure 1-31).
FIGURE 1-31 Search optimized farm.
Service application scaling
As the SharePoint environment continues to grow, a server can continue to be scaled out via server groups. Groupings of servers can be created at each tier based on the service applications or roles that will deliver. These groupings are logical (not configuration-based) in nature, giving administrators guidance about which set of servers should maintain a particular service application or role.
| EXAM TIP |
| Know the roles and servers assigned at each tier of the smallest fault-tolerant SharePoint |
| farm. |
