SharePoint Portal Server 2001 Scenario

This scenario is based on the highly scalable Search and Aggregated Document Management scenario described in the SharePoint Portal Server 2001 Planning and Installation Guide. The server configuration usually consists of two or more dedicated servers running SharePoint Portal Server 2001 that are dedicated to indexing several content sources inside an organization or on the Internet. The dedicated index servers in turn propagate their index catalog databases to a server running SharePoint Portal Server 2001 that is devoted to processing end user search requests. The search requests may originate from a search Web page in a dashboard page or a Web page on the organization's intranet.

The goal is to re-create the equivalent highly scalable, multiple-server indexing and search solution using SharePoint Portal Server 2003 server farms.

Migrating to SharePoint Portal Server 2003

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 provides support for single-server installations up to very large server farm deployments supporting hundreds of thousands of users and millions of documents.

Figure 2 depicts a medium size SharePoint Portal Server 2003 server farm. One server is primarily dedicated to content indexing (while also serving as the job server), and two other servers are dedicated to providing search services to the employee-facing portal site. Alternatively, content searching can be moved to the portal site front-end servers, freeing the original search servers to act as dedicated content indexing servers.

The trade-off between the two solutions would depend on the amount of new and changed content to be indexed relative to amount of the average number of search queries that need to be executed. If the amount of new and changed content is small and the number of portal site users is high, a single-index server (shared with the role of job server) and more dedicated search servers would suffice. If the amount of new and changed content is high (such as with indexing of several external Web sites) with relatively few queries being issues (such as with a small competitive intelligence team), more, dedicated index servers and shared search servers would be the best combination.

Figure 2. SharePoint Portal Server 2003: medium size server farm

Additional Considerations

• All servers in a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 server farm must be running Windows Server 2003 and the same version and language of SharePoint Portal Server. SharePoint Portal Server 2001 dedicated index servers cannot propagate their index catalog databases to a server running SharePoint Portal Server 2003.
• The SharePoint Point Portal Server Upgrade Tool (Upgrade.exe) cannot be used to export configuration from a SharePoint Portal Server 2001 dedicated index server.