Till SharePoint 2013, configuring and setting up the SharePoint Topology needs a special expertise and it’s not cup of tea for everyone. One simple example of managing the distributed cache in SharePoint 2013 environment. In dev/test box, distributed cache may be a negligible service, but in production environment this needs to be taken care at most. Otherwise, this services can slow down the entire farm.
In order to overcome these issues, SharePoint team comes up with “MinRole” configuration. This helps the SharePoint Admin on simplified deployment and simple capacity planning and farm scalability.
When SharePoint admin defines the role of the Server, SharePoint automatically configures the services required for the SharePoint Farm. For example, if I say configure search farm, then I automatically configures the all the search services required for search.
SharePoint 2016 MinRole
SharePoint 2013 Farm Topology
SharePoint 2016 MinRole Topology
With this new Topology, SharePoint needs minimum 5 servers for MinRole.
SharePoint 2016 MinRole using Custom Role
Note: Services are configured on each role is defined in the TechNet.