Sharepoint system architecture

When thinking about sharepoint architecture - you got to first think about the platform architecture and system design. Nowdays, virtualization technology is something we all need to think about when planning system design of any kind. That goes also for sharepoint architecture.

Sharepoint, as we all know is Microsoft's content management system and collaboration tool for groupwares. As such, it is used very often as company's Intranet or Internet presence platform. Since Sharepoint allows you to distribute it's components through many hardware boxes in order to load balance requests - it can be used in so called multi-layerd architecture also known as multi-tier architecture. In multi-tier architecture - Sharepoint can be installed in load-balancing and fail-over environment to provide better performance and high availability.

So, ideal Sharepoint architecture is comprised of multiple hardware boxes serving in multi-tier architecture. Virtualization technology fits well in this multi-box multi-tier architecture. There is only one rule you need to know about - virtualization of database servers is not something you should do or use in production environment. The main reason is because DBs often do a lot I/O disk activity which doesn't perform so well in virtual environment. On the other hand - it is ok to have virtualized DB server in testing environment.