The server farm used Hewlett Packard DL380 G2 and DL 580 servers. These servers were chosen because they and their parts were readily available in the laboratory, the operations personnel were familiar with the equipment, and its Compaq Insight Manager (CIM) centralized integration with the laboratory's monitoring and instrumentation tool, Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2000 and MOM 2000 Service Pack 1 (SP1). Servers provided by other vendors work well in similar server farm configurations, but this paper deals with the configuration specific to the Internet Platform and Operations deployment.

Figure 1 is a diagram of the server farm and the network. For more information about configuring the servers and the hardware used in the server farm, see Windows SharePoint Services Hosting Configuration and Experience, the first paper in this series. For more information about configuring the network and load balancing solutions, see Windows SharePoint Services Network and Load Balancing Design, the third paper in this series.

Figure 1 – 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