MS Server Topology Recommendations

In addition to the many sources of information we discovered a great document from Microsoft full of recommendations, and not a moment too soon to get through the 741 pages of very small print. For a marvelous read check out the full document Planning & Architecture for Office SharePoint Server 2007

With regards topology MS point out the following:

We recommend that you configure Office SharePoint Server 2007 in the order listed below. This order makes configuration easier and ensures that services and applications are in place before they are required by server types.

Recommended Order of installation

1. We recommend that the Central Administration Web application be installed on an application server, such as a query server or a server that runs Excel Calculation Services, but not an index server (for performance reasons). If your farm will have an application server, install Office SharePoint Server 2007 on that server first. This also installs the Central Administration site.


2. All your front-end Web servers.


3. The index server (if using a separate server for search queries and indexing).


4. The query servers, if separate from the index server. (To configure more than one query server in your farm, you cannot configure your index server as a query server.)


5. Other application servers (optional).

Because the SSP configuration requires an index server, you must start the Office SharePoint Server Search service on the computer that you want to be the index server, and configure it as an index server before you can create an SSP. Because of this, you must deploy and configure an index server before other servers. You can choose any server to be the first server on which you install Office SharePoint Server 2007. However, the Central Administration Web site is automatically installed on the first server on which you install Office SharePoint Server 2007.