How Many Servers for SharePoint 2019 Farm?

[jafnva]

Hello,

I've been tasked to start planning and building a SharePoint 2019 farm (until we are able to hire a SharePoint admin). I have enough experience to know there is quite a bit that I do not know so I want to make sure we get the installation/foundation setup correctly.

We have approximately 930 active directory users, with below half that will be using SharePoint. As of now SharePoint will be used for departments to collaborate within their own sites and we plan on taking advantage of workflows, forms, and calendar sharing.

This will be running in a VMware 7 virtual environment and we have enough resources to host multiple servers. 

My question is - how many servers should we build, excluding the SQL server? Even though we have the resources I'd like to keep the server count low. I was thinking of 2 or 3 servers but wanted to check so see what others with more experience think.

Thanks,

John

[#2]

Hello

I made several SharePoint farms, the number of servers to build needs considerable analysis to make that with precision, but, with a similar number of users as your scenario, 2 or 3 SP servers with good resources seems a good start.

[#3]

Thanks Andres - I'm thinking we will use 2 servers with the following roles (not including SQL)

Web Front-End with Distributed Cache
Application with Search

Can these roles be moved to it's own server at a later point if needed?
Thanks again for your help.
John

[#4]

@jafnva If you are thinking about only two servers, then you need to have a very precisely arranged internal SLA for your department. Remember that one server (or one role in the farm) is often a single point of failure.
I would suggest hiring a SharePoint admin first then set up a farm in her/him/they name. There is several setting that you can set up only once over the farm and you need to do it right. One example is Distributed Cache, which sometimes is not recommended for small (or small utilized farms). Look for the documentation Plan for feeds and the Distributed Cache service in SharePoint Server .

Another suggestion is to set up properly each of one database installed on a dedicated SQL Server, bot databases for SharePoint (user's DBs) and SQL Server (system's DB) and decide if you will have critical data there because you will need to use SQL Server AG, and not all SP dbs supporting it.

Many, many if, if, if...