Add servers to a server farm environment

Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

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Topic Last Modified: 2008-08-04

After you have set up the server farm, you might need to add different servers (server farm roles) to the farm to improve the site performance and to manage services more efficiently by distributing them across servers.

This article provides information about:

• Managing different servers in a server farm environment.

• Installing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 on different servers.

• Selecting an installation type depending on the role of the server.

You can add different types of servers to a server farm environment, such as a front-end Web server, an application server, or a database server. These servers together represent the server farm environment. For information about server farms, see Book Excerpt: Design server farms and topologies (Office SharePoint Server). For information about deploying to a server farm, see Deploy Office SharePoint Server 2007 in a server farm environment.

You can add different servers (server farm roles) in the farm to improve site performance. For example, consider organizations that expect lots of queries and have the budget to add servers to their farm. We recommend that you use an independent server to serve as an index server and one or more different servers to serve as query servers for search queries. This increases performance because the server resources that are used to index content are not consumed by servicing search queries. As the number of search queries in the server farm increases, you can add more query servers to the server farm to balance the load.

Deployments that have a separate query server can have a copy of the content index. In this server topology, if the index server has a catastrophic failure, the query server continues to serve search queries while the index server is unavailable. Conversely, if the query server has a catastrophic failure in this topology, a farm administrator can temporarily configure the index server to serve queries from the index server's content index until the query server is repaired.

Perform the following task to add servers to a server farm environment:

1. Manage servers in the farm

2. Manage services on each server in a farm