Hello all,
After working with an existing SharePoint 2 tier installation for about a year (both functioning as WFE's and APP servers), I've been asked to implement 2013 in a slightly more complicated architecture (2 WFE's and 2 APP servers). I didn't set this up and much of it's inherent functionality remains a mystery to me.
In all of my travels and all of the hours reading Technet and Google, two apparently simple concepts about SharePoint have eluded my comprehension...
1. How does SharePoint differentiate between WFE's and APP servers? I've never seen anything in SharePoint/Central Admin that says "deploy new web app listeners only to these servers (WFE's, presumably behind a load balancer...). I've never seen any documentation explaining this or eluding to the concept of what a particular farm member will perform as a role (WFE, APP Server or both).
If you have 10 WFE’s and 10 APP servers and deploy a new web app in Central Admin, how does SharePoint know to create new IIS listeners on only the 10 WFE’s (behind load balancer...) and not the 10 APP servers?
2. While it is apparent in Central Admin to start and stop "services on server" components on whatever farm members there are to distribute their load and create redundancy, there is no way to do the same for SharePoint's WCF Endpoints (Service Applications). it appears to me that only one WCF Endpoint service application (pool) can exist in a farm and they appear to all end up on the same farm member.
When you create Service apps, they are implemented in an app pool that is not distributed among multiple servers, only one.
I've read the docs. Architecture, install, operations, etc and I've never run across anything explaining the particulars of these two questions. Where are these concepts explained?
Thoughts?/Thanks!
Paul
