Switching DNS to point to IP of SharePoint 2010 web front-end server

Question

Our organization's SharePoint Farm was supposed to be a 3 tier architecture but somehow the web server is idle and application server is working as both, web server and application server. Our vendor is about to make a change in Farm to really make it a 3 tier farm.

Now they have advised to switch DNS to point to IP of web front-end server, also they would deploy deployment packages to this idle web server. Please make a note that SharePoint 2010 is running on this web server already, the only issue is that the web server is not separate currently and in some days it would be a separate machine/server.

Is this a right methodology? Will this boost performance of the SharePoint Farm? What good changes it will bring after executing these steps on web front-end server?

Answer 1

Couple of things:

1. Web front server, is it already joined to the farm?
2. if it joined the farm then all packages should exist on that server
3. If Not, then run the config wizard and join this server to farm(make sure this server has same build level as the other.
4. Once you change the DNS pointing from APP server to WFE, make sure update the AAM.
5. Also update the SPNs if you are using the Kerberos Authentication
6. make sure the Web application Services running on the WFE

Is this Right Methodology? Yes it is, you have 3 tier farm( 1 App, 1 WFE, 1 SQL)

Will this boost performance of the SharePoint Farm? Yes it will, because now WFE will server all the end user content and all services applications will be running on App server. Performance, also if you are performing the maintenance on App server...then it will not effect WFE so end user get the content without issue.

I always say this with 3 tier farm, you have high up time because if your one server(WFE) goes down still you can direct traffic to the App server for end user.