What are the advantages and disadvantages of using single server as well as Farm based topologies in Sharepoint?

Answers are for WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007. If you are asking about SP 2010 you are in the wrong forum. 1. Single server Advantage: You can use the free "Windows Internal Database" rather than paying for SQL Server 2005/2008. [Note: because the built.in database system with MOSS 2007 is limited to 4GB database size (and because MOSS 2007 needs more power), the above advantage is only valid for WSS 3.0] 2. Single server Disadvantage: Farms offer better scalability and are even at the basic level of 1 SP + 1 SQL Server server are much more powerful solutions which shows clearly in the performance. SP 2010 "FAQ" (mainly useful links): http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/default.aspx WSS3/MOSS FAQ (FAQ and Links) http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/default.aspx Both also have links to extensive book lists and to (free) on-line chapters

...I'd also throw in scalability as a pro for using a farm. You can easily add additional web front ends and app servers to a farm topology. In a single server environment it won't be as clean to scale. Generally, I never suggest a single server environment for a production environment unless there are cost reasons that you cannot get around for the performance reasons mentioned by Mr. Walsh and the scalability reasons. That being said, a single server instance is great for dev and can be easier to troubleshoot if your not jumping around to different servers. Just my .02 dollars... Good luck, Mark ...And.. I just noticed that Mike said scalability too... I need more coffee...

The other major advantage to a farm-based, multiple server topology is the ability to start to remove single points of failure from your environment. You can load-balance web front end servers to make sure that users can always access your SharePoint web sites, and configure SQL Server in a multitude of ways to make it more highly available (such as log shipping, database mirroring, and clustering). You can also add additional application servers if your farm uses things like Excel Services or InfoPath Forms Services heavily. One note, since as Mike pointed out this is a MOSS 2007 forum, you should keep in mind that search is much less scalable in this release and more difficult to make highly available. You can have multiple query servers to improve search query performance, but you can only have one index server per search index, so that resource cannot be made redundant in a multi-server SharePoint 2007 farm. JohnMCITP and MCTS: SharePoint, Virtualization, Project Server 2007 My books on Amazon: The SharePoint 2010 Disaster Recovery Guide and The SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide. My blog: My Central Admin.