Best Practice for a SharePoint Installation

Question

I want to know the best practice for installing SharePoint with following details:

1. SharePoint high availability for 500 concurrent users, and up to 10 million documents.

2. Servers provisioned across two geographically separate data centers (both in same cities)

3. Users are all internal (Intranet)

4. SharePoint will operate in an internal secure environment with no access to outside Internet

Please recommend the best approach to have all these covered.

I have read across several articles and think installing separate farms across 2 data centers is good option instead of stretched farms.

But still I want to know which is the best practice and provide some official links to install the same.

Answer 1

Stretched farm is not supported in general scenario. MSFT recommend highly consistent intra-farm latency of <1ms, 99.9% of the time over a period of ten minutes. IF you have that available then you can build the farm across two data centers.

I would create Farm in the One Data center( WFE and DB servers in same data center).

For high availability, i would create multiple WFE with Load balancer, Always On Database.

Here is official response from MSFT on stretch farm.

Update on Stretch Farm Support in SharePoint 2013