Performing Administrative Tasks Using Central Administration (part 1) - Managing Web Applications

1. Application Management

Application Management is one of the functional categories on the Central Administration site in which you will spend a lot of time as a SharePoint 2010 farm administrator. As you can see in Figure 1, there are several configuration settings that can be made in this functional category that will help you manage your farm. You will manage your Web applications, site collections, service applications, and content databases from this page in the Central Administration website.

The creation and configuration of Web applications in SharePoint 2010 is very similar to how these same tasks were performed in SharePoint Server 2007, with a few enhancements. One of the improvements in SharePoint 2010 is the ability to create and manage Web applications that exist in Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS 7). You can also use site management tools that enable you to configure and manage site collections, such as quota templates, and you can even configure auto site deletion rules.

1.1. Managing Web Applications

To host site collections and service applications, you need to have a hosting service to manage users’ access. The hosting service for SharePoint 2010 is IIS 7. Although the term Web application has been used consistently in SharePoint over the years, you also may have heard these applications referred to using different terminology, such as websites or virtual servers.

IIS 7 is the application service that enables Microsoft Windows Server 2008 to host websites, SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) servers, and FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites and services, to name a few. The type of websites that IIS 7 can host depends on the software that is installed and configured within it. In the case of SharePoint 2010, you have installed the .NET Framework and the Windows Workflow Foundation, and with these two components, along with IIS, you have a feature-rich set of components that you can use to create your SharePoint 2010 Web applications.

Each Web application is accessed using one of the following three unique configurations.

• IP Address

• Port Number

• Host Header

After identifying what unique configuration you are going to use, you also need to identify an application pool, authentication method, database location, and optionally a mirrored database location. (You’ll explore these in more detail shortly when you create a Web application.) After creating your Web application, you can do one of two things.

• Extend it to create a new site collection.

• Extend it to map to an existing site collection.

If you choose to extend the Web application and create a new site collection, you will also have to associate the top-level site with a site template such as a corporate portal or team site. Table 2 lists the default site template categories and site templates available within each category.

When you create Web applications, it is important to decide if you want to associate each Web application with its own application pool in IIS. There are several reasons to consider this.

• Each application pool runs in its own memory space using a worker process, which means that if an application pool fails, it does not affect other Web applications using their own application pools. Web applications running in the same memory pool with other Web applications may be affected by any failure of other Web applications.

• The memory overhead of an application pool is 30 to 50 megabytes (MB) plus any memory for the applications running in the application pool process space. The various application demands can quickly drive the memory usage of an application pool to 800 MB or more. Multiple worker processes can be associated with a single application pool for resilience.