Planning for Multiple Farms

Consider several key points when designing a SharePoint environment to include multiple farms:

• All SharePoint server roles, with the exception of the database role, can only be a member of a single farm. You cannot have a SharePoint server reside in more than one farm at a time.

• A single database server can contain databases from multiple farms, though it is generally recommended to limit the number of content databases on a single SQL instance to no more than 50.

• If deploying multiple farms on a single SQL server, be sure to use a common naming convention for each farm database so they can be logically organized on the SQL server. For example, naming all databases with the prefix SP_Farm1, SP_Farm2, and so on can help identify which databases belong to which farm.

• All farm members must have near-full network connectivity (1Gb+ Bandwidth, <1ms latency) to all other farm members, with a large number of open ports with nearly all of them open. This effectively limits scenarios in which firewalls separate farm members, unless all ports are open between hosts.

• Although not required to have a test environment exactly match production in terms of the number of servers or the type of server roles, it is critical that the web role servers in each environment match each other so that more effective testing can take place.