I know HA isn't possible. Just getting that out of the way.

There are quite a few postings surrounding trying to get to High Availability, or resiliency to an outage. In an environment with a single primary but several servers with all the site roles removed from the primary aside from the DB and necessities. MP Replicas off the primary, SUP, App Cat, Etc. Does having several SMS_Executive services help or hurt?

My understanding is the SMS_Executive service is its the same thing as the component site role. If you have that running on 3 servers and one goes down does that bring down the entire environment? Granted the MP Replicas will continue to provide policy to the clients and they can still pull content but when the executive/component role goes down on a server what is the fallout???

Moreover if the SMS_Executive goes down does that mean that the SMS Providers will no longer be able to broker communication to the database if its still up? I'm curious about the Component Site Role. Is that and the SMS Executive one in the same?

I watched Brian Mason's video on MP replicas a while ago and I thought there was a discussion similar to this one that said having several SMS_Executive services is a terrible idea, but i can't seem to find that post for the life of me.

Thanks for any insight you can provide, and if my assumptions are way off please let me know where i got off course.

Cheers,

-KR.