Windows SharePoint Services uses two different types of databases: content databases and configuration databases. Data in the lists and libraries on SharePoint sites are contained into the content database. The virtual server settings such as the mapping of site URL to physical storage location are stored into the configuration database. The configuration database can be on the same server as the content database, or on a dedicated server.

To test and validate Windows SharePoint Services server farm scalability, the Internet Platform and Operations group split the content data into two equal databases. Each content database was managed by an instance of SQL Server running on one of the two virtual servers. As well as testing scalability, this design also reduced the time of potential backups and restorations. Each content database was configured to support at least 90 GB of data. One of the content databases shared its virtual server with the configuration database. All sites in a server farm can connect to the same content and configuration databases, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 – Database configuration

Each of the two back-end servers running SQL Server formed a virtual server. Both virtual servers were connected to the SAN as shown in Figure 3. A Hewlett-Packard SAN stored the data repository to help ensure high availability and data integrity by providing redundancy.

The servers were connected with a heartbeat local area network (LAN) that helped monitor server health.

Figure 3 – SQL Server network

Four servers running SQL Server are configured as two Active/Passive-mode clusters by using Microsoft Cluster Service. The high-level design is shown in Table1.

Table 1 – SQL Server clustering