2. System Settings
This functional category
contains the following three core components that are used to manage
different aspects of farm level settings.
The System
Settings will be one of the first management pages that a farm
administrator needs to visit when working in Central Administration,
because it contains some of the core configuration requirements for the
entire SharePoint farm.
2.1. Servers
In the Server category of system
settings, you manage and configure your SharePoint farm servers and
services, and you can obtain information about the SQL Server instance
hosting your SharePoint content, including the name and version of the
configuration database. You can also remove a server from the farm if a
server is unusable for some reason.
2.1.1. Servers In Farm
The Servers In Farm page, shown in Figure 20,
lists all the servers that are participating in the farm. Servers are
sorted by server name on this page. In the top section of this page, you
can see the configuration database version that indicates which
SharePoint version, service packs, and cumulative updates have been
applied to the farm. This section also displays the name, and optionally
the instance, of the SQL Server instance hosting your SharePoint farm’s
content, as well as the name of the farm configuration database.
The bottom section of this
page list all the servers that are part of this farm, along with the
specific SharePoint product running on each server, followed by a list
of services each server is hosting. If there are any configuration
issues, they will be listed in the Status column, which can help you
identify what servers in the farm may not have the most current patches
or service packs installed.
You can use the option to
remove the server from the farm if you have a server that has become
corrupted, and you have no chance to bring it back online as it is. To
rebuild the server and join it back into the farm with the same name,
you must first purge the entries from the configuration database for the
old server using the Remove Server option on the Servers In Farm page.
2.1.2. Manage services on server
The list of services will
only show you the services that have been started on the specific
server. When you have many severs in the farm, the Services On Server
page is the best place to go when you need to see which servers are
running which service. Servers that are not running services but are
configured as part of the farm as a service are also shown on the
Services On Server page. For example, you would see the outgoing mail
server for your SharePoint farm that resides on a server that is not
actually part of the farm.
You can choose any server in
the farm to view its services by selecting the server of choice from the
Server drop-down menu at the upper left of the page. There are two
views available to display the list of services: Configurable and All.
To see just services that have configurable options, including the
option to start and stop the service, you can use the default
Configurable view. To see all services, including those that do not have
configurable options, use the drop-down menu next to the Configurable
view option to select All.
Some of the services listed on the Services On Server page shown in Figure 21
have links that indicate that additional configuration is necessary
either before or after the service starts running. The hyperlink takes
you to the services management page for that service so that you can
perform the necessary configuration. For example, the SharePoint Server
Search service allows you to access the Search Service Application to
manage several configurable components of that service application.
