As part of the release of the SharePoint 2013 Preview, Microsoft has provided a series of diagrams covering a variety of infrastructure areas. One of the more interesting can be regarded a synopsis of farm topology best practices. Even though this diagram can be rendered on a single page (click here to review an interactive version), it is filled with a variety of useful examples and best practices.
Some of the noteworthy highlights specific to SharePoint 2013 are as follows:
- Virtualization – diagrams illustrating both host and virtual machines are provided as are specific heuristics for the use of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 hosts.
- “Stretched” Farms – distribution of servers across more than one datacenter is no longer supported
- Request Management – the ability to control the routing of specific requests to specific servers (new to SharePoint 2013) via a variety of criteria is illustrated.
- Query Management – a query processing “component” replaces the query “role”. The query processing role is more resource intensive and cannot, in most cases, be instantiated on a web front end.
- Office Web Application – even though Office Web Applications are no longer provided as “service applications”, examples of their configuration are shown.
What makes this diagram even more interesting is its relevancy for SharePoint 2010. Some of the generally useful content includes:
- minimum fault tolerance configurations
- service application scale out examples
- search scale out examples
- small, medium, and large farm deployments
- physical and virtual topologies
- database placement heuristics
Since the diagram is also provided in Visio format , it can serve as a starting point for documenting any farm topology.
