By configuring your Web server structure into multiple virtual servers, you gain finer control over the server. In other words, rather than configuring a setting for an entire server, you can configure it for just a virtual server.
You can also configure authentication on a virtual server basis, so that different virtual servers can use different authentication methods. If you have some sites that are internal to an organization and some that are accessible from the Internet, you can host them on separate virtual servers and use the appropriate authentication method for each environment.
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Note
Virtual servers are called Web sites in Internet Information Services (IIS).
Using virtual servers can also allow you to isolate Web sites from one another. SharePoint Team Services supports approximately 1,000 virtual servers per server. Although Windows SharePoint Services supports only 10 to 20 virtual servers per front-end Web server, it does enable at least 10 times as many sites per server. This difference is a result of the use of ASP.NET, which creates a separate set of compiled dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) for each virtual server.
Virtual Servers and DLLs
By configuring your Web server structure into multiple virtual servers, you gain finer control over the server. In other words, rather than configuring a setting for an entire server, you can configure it for just a virtual server.
Because Windows SharePoint Services uses several large DLLs, it is not practical to have them all in memory at the same time. (When you extend a virtual server, approximately 50 megabytes [MB] of memory is taken up by the base working set of processes, including ASP.NET.) However, because you can host multiple site collections on each virtual server, you should not need to create as many separate virtual servers in Windows SharePoint Services as were needed in earlier versions of SharePoint Team Services
Virtual Servers and Application Pools
You can specify different application pools for each virtual server, and be sure that changes made to a site on one virtual server will not accidentally be transferred to another site on a different virtual server.
For more information about application pools and processes, see "Windows SharePoint Services Security Model" in the , or see the Windows Server 2003 Internet Information Services (IIS) product documentation.