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

Sharepoint2016_10

SharePoint 2013 Farm Topology

 Sharepoint2016_11 In standard scenario, SharePoint Farm defined as WFE, Application Server and Database Server. SharePoint administrator needs to identify the service applications and services needs to be deployed on the Farm.

SharePoint 2016 MinRole Topology

With this new Topology, SharePoint needs minimum 5 servers for MinRole.

 Sharepoint2016_12 In the Min Role, need minimum one server for each role. There are four servers required to configure the SP Farm. If Database is included, then SP Farm needs 5 servers. This doesn’t cover the high availability, for example, if any role goes down, then there is no high availability covered. 

If customer needs a high availability for each role, then customer needs to double the MinRole Server.

 

 

SharePoint 2016 MinRole using Custom Role

 Sharepoint2016_13 The number of servers required for MinRole topology may not go well all the customers and all the scenarios. Customer might need a HA and also at the same with minimum number of servers. 

And also, need to consider this topology when we need to upgrade the existing SharePoint 2013 infra to SharePoint 2016.

Custom Role needs to consider when you choose some third party application like Nintex workflow. This has to be installed on the custom role server.

Note: Services are configured on each role is defined in the TechNet.