MOSS Hosting - 3 Server Farm

A 3 server MOSS configuration is not a full high available solution, but does provide a dedicated SQL server and Index server - providing a significant boost to overall performance, especially for the WFE.

Additional "tweaks" can be made to the responsibility of application roles (Excel Services, Search, etc…). By releasing this responsibility from the front end layer, application performance is improved in terms of response time and overall user experience.

For any High Availability server configuration, it should be noted that not all application server roles can be redundant. There are certain limiting factors that restrict you from adding redundancy to server roles. For instance, Indexing servers cannot be redundant. However, Fpweb.net addresses this native deficiency by using replication technology on the Index Servers to provide redundancy for this server role thus removing another single point of failure.