SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Architect's Guidebook

6

SharePoint Fundamentals

By Martin Kearn

This chapter provides an overview of some of the fundamental concepts and terminology used by SharePoint Server 2010. You learn about some of the physical architecture components that are used in SharePoint, such as the concept of a farm and the various server roles. You also learn about sites, site collections, lists, and related technologies that are new to SharePoint 2010 (such as sandboxed solutions).

Finally, you learn about the various licensing models that apply to SharePoint 2010, as well as hosting options.

INTRODUCING THE SHAREPOINT FARM

This section discusses the SharePoint farm and the different components that reside in the farm (such as web applications, servers, service applications, and more).

The SharePoint Farm

The term farm is used to describe a collection of servers that are combined to provide SharePoint services or workloads.

Farms can range in size from just a single SharePoint server to highly scaled, resilient architectures where each individual server role is hosting on a dedicated set of servers.

Some organizations will have only a single farm that hosts all SharePoint services. Large enterprises or organizations with specific requirements may have multiple farms. Fortunately, SharePoint 2010 has been engineered to make integration of multiple farms much simpler than it has been in the past. You learn more about this later in this chapter.

There are several reasons for needing multiple farms. Let's take a look ...