Managing Web Applications with Multiple WFE
I am sure I am missing something really easy here. I have a farm with five WFE's. I want some web applications to run across all the servers but want to others to only use a couple. Our network load balancing equipment will only forward the requets to the appropiate machines but when I join the servers to the farm SharePoint copies over all the web app data which essentially is never used in my environment. How can I manage which WFE runs which web application?
May 24th, 2010 6:48pm

Mark, You are correct, the web sites information is being created on each WFE. However, as you mentioned, your load balancer is only directing traffic to certain WFEs. Because the sites are not getting hit, they are not taking any significant resources on those servers because they are never compiled and placed into memory. The only resource they are taking is some disk space. I just advise clients to leave things as is because of these reasons. JDJD Wade, MCITP SharePoint Consultant, Horizons Consulting, Inc. Blog: http://wadingthrough.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/jdwade
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May 24th, 2010 7:44pm

Mark -- I'm pretty sure that what you're doing (controlling which servers are in your load balanced VIPs) is your only option. If you extend the Web Application role to a server in the farm, its going to get the information on all the content web applications in the farm, you can't pick and choose. The only thing you can do is put something in front of those WFE servers (such as your load balancers) that will dictate which servers receive traffic for which web applications. That being said, the amount of data and config that goes on to a WFE for a specific web application should be pretty minimal. My experience is that you should just have another website (and possibly application pool) created in IIS, some files in the web root, and log files (which won't grow much if the site never gets traffic). The majority of the files and content used to serve up a SharePoint web site resides in the SharePoint configuration and content databases, which are communally shared by all WFEs in your farm and live in SQL Server, not on a WFE. Does that make sense? JohnMCTS: WSS v3, MOSS 2007, and SCOM 2007 Now Available on Amazon - The SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide. My blog: My Central Admin.
May 24th, 2010 7:47pm

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