A Cost Effective Small Farm Deployment of SharePoint

 

For many small or medium size organizations, a small farm depoloyment of SharePoint can meet their requirements. According to Microsoft document, a small farm deployment (One web server, One application server, One database server) or even a limited deployment( One Web Server (with application server) and one database server) could easily serve a few thousands users.

 

A small farm deployment not only saves cost on software/hardware but also saves cost in maintenance. When considering the cost of third party software you have to accquire to support your business, I recommend an even cheaper way to deploy your SharePoint Farm. Since most of the SharePoint vendors will license their products on a per server base, for a small farm deployment you can use just one web front end server. If you use two web front end servers, all your 3rd party solution cost will double.

 

 

As shown next, the cheapest way is do a Two-tier "Limited depoyments". Next to it is do a Three-tier samll farm deployments but removing a web front end server from it.

 

 

When talking about topologies and scale of SharePoint deployments, most of the talks focus on the number of users. Actuall the number of users is just one factor, another important factor is the size of your content, the size of your list or document library (The number of items in list or document library not the file size). A large list will consume a lot of memory on web front end server and database server.

 

If you have many users (a few hundred users) adding contents constantly (a few hundred list items per day) to SharePonit, you do need to consider to scale out by adding more web front end servers and more memory to database server. However if most of your contents are static like a web site, the size of list will be small (less than 5,000 items per list), the memory consumption will be low, your small farm deployment could easily server a few thousand end users.