Deploy inter-farm shared services

  • Article

Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

This Office product will reach end of support on October 10, 2017. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see , Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.

 

Topic Last Modified: 2008-11-17

This article contains guidance for deploying Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 in an inter-farm shared services environment in which a Shared Services Provider (SSP), deployed in a parent farm, provides services to one or more child farms.

In this article:

  • About inter-farm shared services

  • Determine if an inter-farm shared services deployment is appropriate for your environment

  • Inter-farm shared services configuration guidelines

About inter-farm shared services

You can deploy Office SharePoint Server 2007 in an inter-farm shared services environment. By doing so, you can use SSPs in a parent farm to provide services to one or more child farms. There are many advantages to this design, including the ability to centrally administer services across multiple farms and the ability to consolidate servers to reduce the amount of resources required for your deployment.

For more information about SSPs, see Plan Shared Services Providers.

For more information about inter-farm SSPs, see Manage inter-farm shared services (Office SharePoint Server).

For more information about SSP architecture, see Plan SSP architecture.

Determine if an inter-farm shared services deployment is appropriate for your environment

There are a variety of deployment scenarios for which an Office SharePoint Server 2007 inter-farm shared services environment might be appropriate. Consider deploying an Office SharePoint Server 2007 inter-farm shared services if:

  • You need to scale beyond the capabilities of a single farm because you are adding sites and virtual servers.

  • You need to administer and control several separate server farms.

  • You want to use separate hardware for different zones (intranet and extranet, for example), while enabling access to the same data.

  • You have an architecture that requires you to be able to support the aggressive growth of content sites. For example, if you are building a hosting environment, an inter-farm shared services architecture enables you to create a services farm and then, each time you have to add hardware, you can create a new content farm and connect it to the services farm. In this environment, each additional content farm can immediately leverage all of the aggregation services.

  • You are hosting a large number of My Sites and team sites across multiple Office SharePoint Server 2007 farms in a hierarchy.

    You can deploy an Office SharePoint Server 2007 inter-farm shared services topology in which the corporate portal is configured as the parent farm and the other Office SharePoint Server 2007 farms are configured as child farms that consume shared services from the parent. Each child farm can have a dedicated SQL Server cluster, or all farms can share a SQL Server cluster. This is an important deployment scenario if your crawl is very large (30 million items, for example). It is also an important deployment scenario if you want to isolate services to ensure a consistent level of service for each child farm. This deployment scenario can also help you isolate services from content to ensure that an outage related to the portal will not result in a loss of access to services.

An Office SharePoint Server 2007 inter-farm shared services topology might be appropriate if:

  • You want to isolate resource-intensive services on a dedicated set of servers and use child farms for rendering content only. This configuration might be appropriate in a server consolidation scenario or in a server specialization scenario.

  • You want to isolate different customizations and polices in different farms.

  • You have a Search index that exceeds 10 million items.

  • You want to improve the flexibility of your software patching strategy.

  • You want to implement a one-way orchestration framework for Web content that makes it easier to deploy multi-lingual publishing sites.

An Office SharePoint Server 2007 parent-child farm topology is not appropriate if you have multiple farms that are physically separated (for example, if you have geographically distributed data centers), because SharePoint farms cannot consume shared services over a WAN.

Note

If Excel Services is a large part of your Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployment, be aware that Excel Services is not accessible outside the farm that hosts it. If Excel Services is required by a farm, the farm must host the SSP locally. Excel Services can be hosted on a local SSP while all other services are consumed from the parent farm. For this configuration, you need to host an SSP that is running Excel Services locally. In this scenario, make sure all other local services are stopped, especially Search, because the other local services cannot be used but they will consume CPU and memory resources.

Inter-farm shared services configuration guidelines

Consider the following guidelines when you implement an Office SharePoint Server 2007 inter-farm shared services environment:

  • Establish a baseline for the various versions, editions, SKUs, Service Packs, patches, and hotfixes for the software that is installed on the servers in your parent and child farms.

  • Configure backup and restore operations for the parent farm and each child farm in an Office SharePoint Server 2007 inter-farm shared services deployment.

  • Configure multi-lingual publishing sites for an Office SharePoint Server 2007 inter-farm shared services deployment.

  • Configure service accounts and password changes for an Office SharePoint Server 2007 inter-farm shared services deployment. Make sure that the crawl account is a member of the content Web application with read permissions.

  • Configure support for Excel Services for an Office SharePoint Server 2007 inter-farm shared services deployment. Excel Services must be configured in a local SSP on each child farm that needs to use Excel Services features.

  • Configure My Site providers for an Office SharePoint Server 2007 inter-farm shared services deployment.