In SharePoint 2010, you need to differentiate between services and a service application. A service is a component that provides an output that can be utilized by an application. A service application
is an application that is built to utilize one or more services that
exist in the environment. Services in SharePoint 2010 are the foundation
for service applications. Some of these services are associated with
service applications. You deploy your service applications by starting
the associated services on the desired server, selecting those same
services when running the initial Configuration Wizard, or by using
Windows PowerShell. The number of services running varies depending on
the business requirements of your environment.
Services that are commonly associated with a service application that can be consumed by Web applications are explained in Table 1 and Table 2.
Table 1. SharePoint 2010 Services
| SERVICE APPLICATIONS | DESCRIPTION | STORES DATA? | CROSS FARM |
|---|
| Access Services | View, edit, and interact with Microsoft Access 2010 database in a browser. | Cache | No |
| Business Data Connectivity | Access line-of-business (LOB) data systems. | Database | Yes |
| Excel Services | Viewing and interact with Microsoft Excel files in a browser. | Cache | No |
| Managed Metadata Service | Access
managed taxonomy hierarchies, keywords, and social tagging
infrastructure as well as content type publishing across site
collections. | Database | Yes |
| PerformancePoint | PerformancePoint
Services enables users to create interactive dashboards that display
key performance indicators (KPIs) and data visualizations in the form of
scorecards, reports, and filters. | Database | No |
| PowerPoint | View, edit, and broadcast Microsoft PowerPoint presentations in a Web browser. | Cache | No |
| Search | Crawls content, produces index partitions, and serves search queries. | Database | Yes |
| Secure Store Service | Provides single sign-on authentication to access multiple applications or services. | Database | Yes |
| State Service | Provides temporary storage of user session data for SharePoint Server components. | Database | No |
| Usage and Health Data Collection | Collects farm-wide usage and health data and provides the ability to view various usage and health reports. | Database | No |
| User Profile | Adds support for My Sites, Profiles pages, Social Tagging, and other social computing features. | Database | Yes |
| Visio Graphics Service | Allows viewing and refresh of published Microsoft Visio diagrams in a Web browser. | Blob Cache | No |
| Web Analytics | Provides Web Service interfaces. | | Yes |
| Word Automation Services | Performs automated bulk document conversions. | Cache | No |
| SharePoint Foundation Subscription Setting Service | Tracks subscription IDs and settings for services that are deployed in partitioned mode. (Windows PowerShell only) | Database | No |
The Microsoft Office Web applications are not cross-farm services. Microsoft Project Server 2010 stores data in a database. Table 2 provides details about these types of Web applications.
Table 2. Office Web Apps Services
| OFFICE WEB APPS SERVICES | DESCRIPTION |
|---|
Microsoft Word 2010 Viewing Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 Excel Services in SharePoint 2010 Microsoft OneNote 2010
| Office
Web Apps is a new Web-based productivity offering from Microsoft Office
2010 suites. Office Web Apps services include companions to Microsoft
Word 2010, Microsoft Excel 2010, Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, and
Microsoft OneNote 2010. These Web-based applications are stand-alone
applications focused on offering access to Word 2010, PowerPoint 2010,
Excel 2010, and OneNote 2010 documents through any browser across
multiple platforms. They provide lightweight creation and editing
capabilities in standard formats, sharing and collaboration on those
documents through the browser, and a variety of Web-enabled scenarios.
Documents created using these Web applications are no different than
documents created using the corresponding desktop applications. The
associated services are used to prepare documents for viewing and
editing in a Web browser. |
| Microsoft Project Server 2010 | Hosts one or more Microsoft Project Web Access instances, exposes scheduling functionality
and other middle-tier calculations on Microsoft Project data, and
exposes Web services for interacting with Microsoft Project 2010 data. |
1. Single and Cross-Farm Services
Some services can be
shared across server farms, while other services can be shared only
within a single farm. Services that support sharing across farms can be
run in a central farm and consumed from farms in regional locations. In
this example, the shared services farm is a services-only farm and sits
in your Data Center. You have multiple regional locations with their own
farms, and you now have child farms consuming services from a parent
farm. Computing-intensive services, such as searching and indexing, can
be configured in a central farm to minimize administration overhead and
to scale out those services easily and efficiently as business
requirements change. Table 3 provides a list of both single farm services and cross-farm services.
Table 3. Services Comparison of Single and Cross-Farm Services
| SINGLE FARM SERVICES | CROSS-FARM SERVICES |
|---|
| Access Database Services | Business Data Connectivity |
| Excel Services | Managed Metadata Service |
| PerformancePoint | Search |
| PowerPoint | Secure Store Service |
| State Service | User Profile (People) |
| Usage and Health Data Collection | Web Analytics |
| Visio Graphics Service | |
| Word Automation Services | |
2. Services Applications Logical Architecture
A service application
provides a resource that can be shared across sites within a farm or, in
some cases, across multiple farms. The architecture for service
applications consists of the following components: Internet Information
Services (IIS), Web applications, and application pools. Together they
help make up the logical architecture.
2.1. Internet Information Services
All service applications
in a farm reside within the same IIS website, SharePoint Web Services.
Within this website, Service Applications are named utilizing a long
GUID format. To see the individual Web service, you must look at the
physical path of that service application or select the content view.
The default path for all service applications is C:\Program
Files\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\Web Services, as illustrated in Figure 1.
2.2. Web Applications
In SharePoint 2010, you
can now configure Web applications to use only the services that are
needed, rather than the entire set of services that are deployed. Just
as you can now share across farms, you can also configure SharePoint
2010 to share service
applications that can be shared across multiple Web applications. Web
applications can also have multiple instances of the same service in a
farm. You can simply create and deploy using unique names to the
resulting service applications.
2.3. Application Pools
You can manipulate service
applications within the application pool by deploying service
applications to different application pools. This is done to achieve
process isolation. Remember that each application pool has a worker
process, and this is a one-to-one relation. So, more application pools
equal more worker processes, which can have major performance impact on
your servers. In some scenarios, the number of application pools versus
server resources can present capacity planning decisions, depending on
your company’s business requirements. But this architecture
does allow service applications to be isolated physically by creating
separate instances of them and allowing them to be consumed within a
separate application pool.
