SharePoint availability

Question

I want to create a SharePoint Server setup that will allow applications to be highly avaliable. Say if we have a portal in SharePoint, and I wanted to make it available always. I know it has to do with WFE. Someone guide me with article or Arch that need to be set for this.

Answer 1

Having multiple WFE (Web Front-ends) will make the web part of your SharePoint more reliable -- if one goes down, you can have your load-balancer stop sending requests to it. There is no way to ensure 100% uptime -- reliability is a combination of having redundancy (in hardware and services), monitoring, 24x7 staff to fix problems, etc.

Some things to look at:

Plan for Redundancy http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263044.aspx

Plan for Availability http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc748832.aspx

There are third-party products that can help with fail-over, but I haven't used one to recommend.

Answer 2

See Lou's links. You can have redundant WFEs, query servers, and application servers as well as cluster your database.

Note that you cannot have a redundant index server unless you have two SSPs that basically index the same content. The query servers get the index replicated on them, so if the index server goes down you can still perform a query, the index will just not be updated until the index server comes back online. If you can't get it back online you will need to rebuild your index (full crawls).