SharePoint Tutorial -SharePoint Physical Architecture

The SharePoint physical architecture consists of services running on one or more servers.

Services
There are three types of services that together run the SharePoint farm: web, application and database services. Web services through Internet Information Server is what processes the ASP.Net and sends back the html to a user's browser. Application services is where the "brains" of SharePoint are located. All of the SharePoint specific logic and services are processed there. Database services are run by SQL Server and it's where all the data/content for SharePoint is stored.

Servers
All the services to run a SharePoint farm can be run on one server or on multiple servers. For scalability (performance) and redundancy (fail-safe) purposes a distributed (multi-server) architecture is highly recommended.

Single Server Farm

 

 

Multi-Server Farm