Hi, I have a SharePoint services 3.0 farm with the SQL server on a separate machine. So there is the SQL Server and the Web Front end server. The Web Front End is giving us some trouble and we have decided to cut away the sick part :) I was thinking adding a new server to the farm and moving the Central Administration, setting up the existing sites and then when everything is accesible on the new web front end server I could remove the old one. Is this doable? There is about 15 sites one the server with only 2-3 .wsp deployed solutions so that wouldn't be the problem I guess. But as I haven't done this before I would like your input. Will I have to create all the sites again or will the adding of another server to the farm mirror the applications? I just added a server to a SharePoint 2010 development environment, but I have not tried it using WSS 3.0 before, in 2010 it mirrored the sites. How does the whole multiple webfront end servers fit in to this farm concept?. Is it possible to have a web application on one wfe and not on another? having 200 applications in a farm and they actually being on each wfe server seems rather heavy when you could split them up. Anyway I'm new to the whold multiple wfe concept so any insights would be appreciated. -- Christian

Hi, Add another WFE to the farm, stop the services one at a time and add them to the new server. After you have moved the services to the new WFE, run the following commands to remove central Admin from your current server and provision a new one... psconfig -cmd adminvs -unprovision psconfig -cmd adminvs -provision -port-windowsauthprovider onlyusentlm WFEs mirror all deployed solutions, WebApps etc.., this reduces the complexity of configuration management, allows you to have many WFEs in large farms. No its not popssible to assign a Web App to a single WFE Cheers, -Ivan Ivan Sanders My LinkedIn Profile, My Blog, @iasanders.

Thank you Ivan, that seems like a possible way to go. I was thinking, if you have a lot of applications and you access these on say server1, the applications are just sitting on server2 and server3 doing nothing. Could you stop the IIS sites and Application pools on server2 and server3. I know you could use this for load balancing but if that is not neccesary? would stopping the sites not in use cause problems? -- Christian PS, posted the original post with the wrong account ;)

Hi Christian, No worries... Not all farm members have to be WFEs, App Servers play an increasing role in 2010. Not as much with WSS or SharePoint Foundation but definetly with SharePoint 2010... You could stop the sites on srv1 and srv2 but I wouldnt you will end up with errors... Just dont start or stop the Windows SharePoint Services Web Application on the servers you dont need to be WFEs. How many sites are you talking about and what kind of usage? If you want to run multiple WFEs to derease latency, IIS isnt your issue main issue, SQL IO and memory are probably the first 2 places to improve. Why not run multiple WSS Farms? The overhead for WSS CA and Search is negligible, if worried about app pools memory is cheap run x64... A better way to think of WSS is as a development platform that sits on top of IIS. Where IIS Hosts Web Sites, WSS hosts Web Applications.. -Ivan Ivan Sanders My LinkedIn Profile, My Blog, @iasanders.

Thank you again. It's all a bit theoretic, but someday another server might be needed :) I'll try this as a way of moving the apps to another server so the sick one can be put to sleep ;) -- Christian