Anatomy of a SharePoint 2010 Farm

SharePoint 2010 farms employ three tiers of components. Shown here is a simplified view of the logical components of a SharePoint 2010 farm, a collection of centrally managed servers that host SharePoint content and services.

Web applications (top) authenticate users and enable them to read and update site content (such as documents) in SharePoint content databases. Web applications rely on service applications (middle) to retrieve user profile data needed to personalize content, to search content by keyword, and to handle other tasks (not shown). (Service applications replace the Shared Service Providers found in earlier versions of SharePoint.) SQL Server databases (bottom) store content and most data used by service applications, such as user profiles and the “search crawl” databases that coordinate the search indexing process. A farm configuration database records the overall structure and settings of the farm.

Organizations might create multiple Web applications and give them their own service applications for security or other reasons. For example, the farm shown here runs one Web application (Portal) for most of its users, but has a separate Web application (Finance) for the organization’s finance department. The Finance Web application has its own search service application, but shares a user profile application with the other Web applications in the farm.