Organizations can deploy SharePoint Products and Technologies in many different configurations. This second version of SharePoint Products and Technologies provides a powerful and flexible portal site infrastructure that meets the demanding scale, performance, and extensibility needs of the very largest organizations. It also delivers a preconfigured solution that is easy for smaller organizations to deploy.

The number of users can often serve as the first selection criterion for organizations planning to implement SharePoint Products and Technologies solutions. The following table lists the recommended SharePoint Products and Technologies topology for optimal use of hardware resources based on the estimated number of users. Due to global network latency issues, organizations sometimes must make deployments in multiple locations.

* Most organizations of this size want a high-availability solution and, therefore, should deploy a medium farm.

Minimum High-Availability Solution

For many organizations, the high availability of the solution is a more important selection criteria than the actual performance measured in pages per second. To deploy a high-availability solution, you must use a server farm. The smallest highly available SharePoint Portal Server 2003 server farm topology consists of two Web servers that also service search requests, two clustered computers running SQL Server, and a dedicated index management server.

By using a server farm, it is possible to perform operations such as driver updates, operating system or software patches, Web Parts installations or upgrades, reboots, etc. in a sequenced manner without disruption to the service.

Single-Server Deployment

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 delivers a powerful and flexible portal site solution. Many organizations can address all their capacity requirements with a single server.

In this scenario, the server runs all the tasks related to SharePoint Portal Server: Web, index, and search. The database that SharePoint Portal Server 2003 uses can be either MSDE or SQL Server. When deciding how many users a single-server solution can support, consider these guidelines:

• MSDE is appropriate for up to 1,000 users
• SQL Server is appropriate for up to 10,000 users

The following table lists the hardware requirements for a single-server deployment.

A system built with the hardware described in the preceding table should have the following performance characteristics:

• Process 15 requests per second (PCA¹) (including 2 searches per second) with MSDE

   Note    MSDE has a database size limit of 2 GB and a limit of 5 concurrent jobs.

• Process 32 requests per second (including 4 searches per second) with SQL Server
• Index 5 documents per second
• Store up to 100,000 documents (using SQL Server)
• Index up to 1 million documents (using SQL Server)
• Host up to 10,000 team and personal sites
• Host up to 5 portal sites (using shared services)

Recommendation

Running a portal site solution on a single server is a CPU-intensive task. Therefore, use a server with at least two processors.

 Note   You are not protected from hardware failures with a single-server installation. Also, all operations that must restart critical services affect the service that end users see.

¹ PCA Peak Common Action

The recommendations in this paper are based on a combination of performance measurements of the following common portal operations:

• 50% portal home page access
• 15% search operations
• 15% My Site private access
• 10% site directory access
• 5% topic area navigation
• 5% team site access

Small Farm

You can deploy SharePoint Portal Server 2003 on a small farm to free the front-end Web server from SQL Server tasks. The following table lists the hardware requirements for a small farm deployment.

A system built with the hardware described in the preceding table should have the following performance characteristics:

• Process 37 requests per second (including 5 searches per second)
• Index 5 documents per second
• Store up to 100,000 documents
• Index up to 1 million documents
• Host up to 10,000 team and personal sites
• Host up to 5 portal sites (using shared services)

Recommendation

Running a portal site solution on a single server is a CPU-intensive task. Therefore, use a server with at least two processors.

Medium Farm

You can deploy SharePoint Portal Server 2003 on server farms to address the performance, scale, and high-availability needs of very large organizations. The following table lists the hardware requirements for a medium farm deployment.

A system built with the hardware described in the preceding table should have the following performance characteristics:

• Process 80 requests per second (PCA), including 12 searches per second
• Index 10 documents per second
• Store up to 1 million documents
• Index up to 5 million documents
• Host up to 50,000 SharePoint sites and personal sites
• Host up to 25 portal sites using shared services
• Host up to 10 portal sites not using shared services

Recommendation

If you deploy a medium or large farm, equip your servers with more than one network card for better throughput. For more information, see the Microsoft Solution Accelerator for Intranets

Large Farm

The SharePoint Portal Server 2003 solution can scale to the largest usage scenarios. The following table lists the minimum hardware requirements for a large farm deployment.

A system built with the hardware described in the preceding table should have the following performance characteristics:

• Process 100 requests per second (PCA) including 15 searches per second
• Index 10 documents per second
• Store up to 1 million documents
• Index up to 5 million documents
• Host 50,000+ SharePoint sites and personal sites
• Host up to 25 portal sites using shared services
• Host up to 10 portal sites not using shared services

You can extend this topology by adding more hardware as needed. For example, in the test lab, extending the large farm to:

• 14 load-balanced front-end Web servers (dual 2.8 GHz, 2 GB RAM),
• 4 search servers (dual 2.8 GHz, 2 GB RAM),
• 2 index or job servers (dual 2.8 GHz, 2 GB RAM) and
• 1 back-end SQL server (quad 1.9 GHz, 4 GB RAM) resulted in:
  • 625 requests per second during PCA
  • 852 pages per second portal site home page throughput
  • 1,105 pages per second topics page throughput
  • 856 pages per second team site home page throughput

Shared Services

Depending on the divisional structure and geographic locations in your organization, you may need multiple server farms. Dedicated farms supporting specific types of SharePoint sites benefit organizations that must:

• Address throughput and availability requirements for the portal site and team Web sites independently
• Enforce different security and customization standards for the portal site and the team Web sites
• Address the need for a large number of portal sites or centralized personal sites by using shared services

Shared services have a small negative effect on the overall throughput of a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 deployment, up to about 10 percent throughput cost at 50 child portal sites.

Most of the cost of shared services is memory consumed by multiple portal sites. The memory consumption of 50 portal sites is typically 2 GB; it grows to 4 GB for 100 portal sites.

Recommendation

If you plan to deploy multiple portal sites, use shared services.