Let's say for an intranet application on SharePoint 2013 platform we need 3 front-end servers, 1 app server, 1 search server and 1 DB server. Out of total 20K internal user 12K is in India and 8K in USA. They have data centers in both places. If company is having good money and they are willing to invest to get performance for both users, should they deploy same application in both places as 2 different farm or should they keep only in 1 place as single farm or should they split different servers of the same farm in 2 locations? in any of the cases how front end other servers should be connected? How others servers will be distributed? Load balancing works for distributed WFE servers?
Is latency issue is addressed if WFEs are dispersed across Geo locations?
3 Answers
You scenrio is fall under the stretched farm which is commonly unsupported but with the exception is for few topologies(but where you have latency <1ms)
Question: My customer wants to distribute their topology across one or more distinct geographic boundaries (i.e. between cities, states, provinces), is this supported? Answer: No.
Question: My customer maintains a logical datacenter comprised of one or more physical buildings on a single site. Is this supported? Answer: Yes, providing there is a highly consistent intra-farm latency of <1ms, 99.9% of the time over a period of ten minutes. (Intra-farm latency is commonly defined as the latency between the web front-end and database servers)
Update on Stretch Farm Support in SharePoint 2013
Now, I would go with one farm in either location( USA or India) and then let every body access that.Either Public internet or via Intranet.
It isn't a supported architecture from Microsoft's perspective. I have heard from PFE's that they have been able to use SQL as a Service in Azure to make SharePoint 2013 Georedundant, but it isn't supported. You could try it, but you'd be venturing out on your own.
An alternate possibility would be housing the farm in a data center in between both locations. Latency is key, meaning the SQL server has to be as close as possible to the WFEs in order to get good performance.
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I have another question here. If WFEs are dispersed across Geo locations can we solve latency issue? Sep 15, 2015 at 18:21
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@user17251 you are limited by physics. You can install WAN optimizer, but there is only so much you can do when you have to send a packet thousands of miles. Sep 16, 2015 at 21:56
I would suggest the following because your client seem to have good money!
Two different farms but create trust between them which allows you to share service applications e.g user profile and meta data service. This also allows you to have web apps specific to a geography. Honestly, i never worked in a multi-farm environment but i definitely heard about architectures of some global farms implementing separate farm for each geography and share service applications. If you do not have this need then it is easier to have a single farm where maximum key employee base is and not necessarily by total employee count of each region.
