SharePoint Server Concepts and Fundamentals

Question 1

What is a SharePoint Farm

Answer 1

A SharePoint Farm is a collection of servers that work together to provide a set of basic enterprise and web content management services.

It’s a combining of services that make up the SharePoint Farm, like Documents/Files, Folders, Business Intelligence, Structured Data, Search, Tagging, Websites..Sets of services, components, features tied together.

Question 2

Why Install a SharePoint Farm

Answer 2

Firstly, if you have a single server then it’s a single failure. There’s a single point of failure for performance and scalability.

More servers then you get distributed protection.

Scalability - ability to scale to meet the needs of content and data.

Resilience - Recover from failure at any level.

Performance - Increase performance for end-user requests and internal services.

Question 3

What are the SharePoint Farm Types ?

Answer 3

Standard Servers Roles -

Dedicated Server Roles

Shared Roles

Question 4

SharePoint 2013 Server Roles

Answer 4

Web Server

Application Server

Search Server

Database Server

Question 5

SharePoint 2016/2019 Dedicated Server Roles

Answer 5

Front–End Server

Application Server

Distributed Cache Server

Search Server

Question 6

SharePoint 2016/2019 Shared Server Roles

Answer 6

Front-end with Distributed Cache - shared role that combines the Front-end and Distributed Cache roles on the same server.

Application with Search - Shared role that combines the Application and Search roles on the same server.

Question 7

What is SharePoint MinRole ?

Answer 7

• is a SharePoint 2016 and higher option.
• uses predefined server roles
• set the roles at the server creation
• required services are automatically configured based on defined role, nothing else gets added over and above what has been specified in the product for the specific role.

Question 8

Benefits of SharePoint 2016/2019 MinRole ?

Answer 8

• Simple and repeatable deployments (can easily script out process)
• Improved performance and reliability
• Better capacity planning and farm scalability.

Question 9

What are Web Applications ?

Answer 9

are top-level containers for content in a SharePoint farm.

• in its simplest form is a website that has specific security. Its the data segmentation using content databases, file system and core platform files. So web application is really the component where we build a site with all of its corresponding components.
• is a container that hosts various different things.
  A web application is the parent level container that can host other components.