Copyright 2010. John Stover

Microsoft has some pretty good information posted about the hardware and software requirements necessary for SharePoint 2010.  I still get asked for real world, or ‘best practices’, recommendations all the time.  Like everyone else, I want to get the best performance for the best price.  It’s difficult to strike the balance between ‘good enough’ and ‘optimized’.

A large majority of the SharePoint projects that I work on end up being small-ish SharePoint farms (between 2 and 8 servers).  Due to the licensing required for Windows, SQL Servers, and SharePoint servers, most organizations do try to get by with as few servers as possible, yet still want the best possible performance.  The most common configuration that I see in the SharePoint world involves a single dedicated SharePoint server and a single dedicated SQL Server.  From there, organizations usually first add another SharePoint server, then a 3rd SharePoint server, then a second SQL Server, and then the sky is literally the limit.