SharePoint 2010 – Role of the App Server

by Cory Peters on April 29, 2010 in Blog with 4 Comments

Previously in SharePoint 2007 a common SharePoint environment looked something like:

Web Front End Server
Application / Index Server
Database Server

Now when we said “Application Server” that usually meant things like Central Administration and Search but really didn’t mean a whole lot because while we wanted to isolate additional services to this box, SharePoint didn’t give us that level of control.

Enter SharePoint 2010…

SharePoint 2010 allows for much more granular control over the services that run and where they run by building a full (and extensible!) Service Oriented Architecture. This means that we can now utilize our Application server for almost anything including the following items:

Specific Timer Jobs – Targeted per Content Database
Service Applications – Target a much larger number of services to a specific server that we previously could in 2007
User Code Service – Isolated service for sandbox solutions

For those of us that have an existing Application Server or if you are planning your new SharePoint 2010 farm topology be sure to think about your service allocation and take better advantage of that “Application Server” role.

Cory Peters

I'm a public speaker and the Chief SharePoint Architect for Eastridge Technology, a Microsoft Gold Competency Partner in Winston-Salem, NC. I focus on the SharePoint platform with a specialty in Information Architecture, Internet Facing and Mobile applications.

Eddie says:

October 27, 2010 at 5:26 pm

Hi Cory,

Thanks for the post. It was educational. I have a question:
If I need to have a single dedicated Index server, is it necessary to have the Web Server role installed, or just having Application Server role is enough?

Thanks,
Ed

Cory says:

November 5, 2010 at 12:57 pm

Hey Eddie,

You’re index server is usually still a “web server” even if end user traffic doesn’t access it directly due to the fact that it may be the dedicated crawler or hosting central administration.

Guy says:

December 1, 2010 at 1:09 pm

Thanks for the explanaiton. What about the web server role. Should I be creating all my websites and teamsites there ? My consultant had me put everything on the app server so I am not sure what the web server role is for ?

Thanks
Guy

Neeraj Shukla says:

January 29, 2011 at 2:34 am

Hi Cory,
I am facing one issue when I am trying to index OneNote docs.
I’ve seen a bunch of errors in our crawl logs when search tries to index a .one file.

Can you please suggest what needs to be done to OOB SharePoint 2010 search to crawl OneNote files?

Please reply on my mail,
Thanks in Advance
Regards
Neeraj