Hello We have a SharePoint product and we have based our licensing on the numer of front-ends. We are using the SPServerRole enumeration (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.administration.spserverrole(office.12).aspx ) to check the number of front-ends in the farm. My question is – when will the server introduce itself as the front-end rather than application? What services/components have to be on the server to switch from one to another? Is a server with only the central admin a front-end or application? How about with only the indexing service? Or when it host web app and is indexing at the same time? I understand the logical definition of front-end and application server – I need to know when SharePoint will define server as front end and when as application. Best regards, Marcin

Hi Marcin, Normally, a WFE in SharePoint farm means that server running SharePoint Web Application Service. An Application Server, on the other hand, refers to the server running Search Index, Query, Excel Service, BDC and so on. When users access to a SharePoint site, a WFE will be called based on the server name or host header in site URL. If user interact with SharePoint for some functionality, WFE sends request to application server for various services. Results are returned from Application Server to WFE and displayed for user whom submitted the query. To host Central admin site, the server should be running a Central Administration Service. Please note that it is not recommended to host Central Admin sit on WFE server. For details, please refer to the “Recommended order of configuration” section of the following reference: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262079(office.12).aspx Hope it helps. Thanks & Regards. Lily Wu TechNet Subscriber Support in forum If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tngfb@microsoft.comLily Wu