Web Application or Site Collection Architecture for My Sites in SharePoint 2013

Question

I am designing a solution for our client which have the following 'Areas'

• Teams
• Committees
• My Sites
• Projects (MS project server)
• Apps

I see the best approach is creating a Web Application (WA) for teams/committees each with their own site collection, a WA for My Sites, a WA for Projects and a WA for Apps.

The issue is Microsoft states conflicting best practices. One tech net article describes the best approach only have one WA per Farm including My Sites. Another states that My Sites should always have its own WA due to performance.

Can someone please validate my approach of having a separate WA for My Sites or at least give me a reason why I should go down a different path e.g. one share WA with a Site Collection for My Sites

If you are interested the two conflicting articles are http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263267.aspx - One shared Web App http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262500.aspx - My Sites its own Web App

Thanks!

Answer 1

The idea behind using one shared web application with host-named site collection is to overcome web application limitation of using multiple DNS name without having to extend the web application. By using host-named site collection, the DNS can now be set at site collection level and of course a site collection’s DNS name can be different from DNS of a Web application.

Also to use one Web application to host all site collections (TeamSites, MySites or even Portal sites) within a farm helps avoid using separate application pools, which would definitely add to scalability, and eventually less consumption of farm resources.

Microsoft tends to provides and educate people with different architecture approaches for designing your logical architecture but it is entirely up to your requirements and planning.

I would recommend you the Kirk Evans post if you plan to use one (shared) web application as a start to design your logical architecture.

Answer 2

Creating a new web application/pool with it's own service account can be used as a way to separate things for security purposes. For example you might want to create a web application for SharePoint Apps that might contain untrusted code. Running that code in its own Web Application Pool under a different service account is a way of mitigating risk. Remember, sp_AppPool is a fairly privileged account.

With a host named site collection you can still do things like create and assign sites to multiple content databases for performance or organizational purposes.