Set up a multiple farm topology

Article
01/10/2017

Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

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Topic Last Modified: 2016-11-14

Server farms that run Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 work independently from each other. Tools such as search indexes and content databases are not replicated across farms. Therefore, no content or information is shared if you have multiple server farms in your environment that host different content and sites. However, for many scenarios, you need server farms to be able to share content and interact with other server farms.

When you need to set up more than one farm, you have several choices, depending on your specific scenario. There are many considerations that you must review before you configure multiple farms in your environment. Some considerations are shown in the following scenarios.

If you need your SharePoint sites to be online and available at all times (high availability), you might need multiple server farms configured so that you can provide the ability to failover from one farm to another quickly.

You can use Microsoft SQL Server and other tools to make the content from your server farm more available. For more information about how to make content more available, see Plan for redundancy (Office SharePoint Server) and Using Database Mirroring with Office SharePoint Server and Windows SharePoint Services (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=83725&clcid=0x409).
If you have a geographically dispersed organization, you might want to have content from the main region available in other regions, as needed, plus additional local content available in other regions.

You can use multiple farms and shared services to ensure that regional and central content is hosted and served efficiently in your global organization. For more information about best practices for supporting geographically dispersed organizations, see Globally deploying multiple farms.
If you have multiple farms that serve different types of SharePoint sites (such as collaboration sites and an intranet portal), you might want to share resources, even though you are hosting the sites on different server farms.

You can use Shared Services Providers (SSPs) to centralize services, but provide them to multiple farms to make the most of your resources. For more information about how to plan for shared services, see Plan SSP architecture. For more information about how to configure SSPs, see Create and configure Shared Services Providers.
If you are creating a published site, you can publish content from one environment to another environment (for example, from an internally accessed authoring environment to an external published environment like an Internet presence site). For this scenario, you might want to use separate farms for the authoring and publishing environments.

You can configure multiple farms and use content deployment to publish your content from an authoring environment to a publishing environment. For more information about authoring and publishing farms, see Design content deployment topology.

For more information about how to plan your server farms, and other situations in which you might need multiple farms, see Book Excerpt: Design server farms and topologies (Office SharePoint Server), which includes the following articles:

Set up a multiple farm topology

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