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Will it be a good practice or a maintainable solution to install multiple SSL sites on a single SP farm (web app per SSL site) or should I prefer virtualized Is it really gonna work fine without problems and is maintainable (I could also alternatively separate the SSL web apps each to its own virtual SP environment)?

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A single SP farm vs virtualizing many SP farms?

A single SP farm can handle multiple SSL sites, as long as they're on unique IPs. A separate farm per site would be a waste of resources. SharePoint is designed to handle multiple.

As far as maintainable, that would depend on your site collections and content databases and anticipate database sizes. Also, the more web apps you add, potentially the more RAM you'll consume.

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Thx. How would you see it if I was limited to SQL express editions? (ie one hyper-v'd light-weight standalone sp foundation w 2 webapps vs two standalones)? – thomius Feb 21 '12 at 19:47
SQL Express will limit you on database size, it's terrible for maintenance, limited cores, etc. See more on microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/product-info/compare.aspx. Due to the limitations, I would lean towards using multiple servers for SQL Express. You can keep the one farm, but as you build out site collections, point to different SQL Express installations. This will help spread the resources out. – David Lozzi Feb 21 '12 at 20:01
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IIS 7 and above can use SSL in Host Header mode, allowing multiple sites to use the same IP with different certs. A Wildcard SSL certificate would also allow you to use multiple sites with the same IP/cert (and less configuration than SSL Host Header mode). – Trevor Seward Feb 21 '12 at 20:58
Nice @TrevorSeward didn't know that was now available. Thanks! – David Lozzi Feb 21 '12 at 21:01
I'm not sure thats right Trevor, I by mistake one day loaded 2 SSL certs to different sites (a mysite and a sharepoint web app) and we got all kinds of weird problems. Basically the site would not load until we unbound them. – pigeon Feb 22 '12 at 1:02
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