Server Farm Basics (Windows SharePoint Services 2.0)

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Figure 1 shows the diagram of the server farm and network set up by the Internet Platform and Operations group. The following sections will discuss the implementation of this Windows SharePoint Services server farm in more detail.

Note

All Internet Protocol (IP) addresses in this paper are fictitious and are listed as examples only. The public IP address of the Internet Space network used in this paper is not the IP address of the actual deployment described. For the purpose of this paper, the IP address of the Internet Space network will be 200.100.1.0, the IP address of the Front End network will be 172.16.1.0, and the IP address of the Back End network will be 10.1.1.0.

The storage area network (SAN) is one physical unit, but is partitioned so that each of the two Microsoft SQL Server clusters uses distinct SAN partitions.

For details about the hardware and software used in this server farm, see the first white paper in this series, Windows SharePoint Services Hosting Configuration and Experience(https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=18323\&clcid=0x409).

The following terms are used in this paper and may be unfamiliar to some users:

  • Edge network A network that connects an Internet data center and a corporate network.

  • NAT (Network Address Translation) An alias IP address that identifies a specific node managed by the BIG-IP controller to the external network.

  • Predictive mode A dynamic load balancing mode that bases connection distribution on a combination of two factors: number of connections and response time. Servers that currently host the fewest connections and also have the fastest response times will be assigned more connections. Predictive mode also ranks server performance over time, and passes connection to servers that exhibit an improvement rather than a decline.

  • SNAT (Secure Network Address Translation) A routable alias IP address that one or more nodes can use as a source IP address when making connections to hosts on the external network.

Figure 1: Server Farm Configuration

Server farm configuration

  1. Public DNS servers

  2. Internet

  3. Router (Cisco Systems)

  4. Load balancer (F5 Networks BIG-IP)

  5. Load balancer (F5 Networks BIG-IP)

  6. Front-end Web server farm (six servers)

  7. SMTP and DNS server

  8. Terminal services, debugging, and administration server

  9. SQL Server server 1

  10. SQL Server server 2

  11. SQL Server server 3

  12. SQL Server server 4

  13. SAN unit (Hewlett Packard)

  14. Active Directory domain controller 1

  15. Active Directory domain controller 2

  16. MOM server

  17. Backup server (Veritas software)

  18. Backup tape device

  19. HTML transformation server

  20. Imaging and installation server (Altiris deployment server)

  21. Router (Cisco Systems)

  22. Edge network