About extending a virtual server

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services uses virtual servers to host Web sites on your server. The process of applying Windows SharePoint Services to a virtual server is called extending. You must extend a virtual server with Windows SharePoint Services before you can create a Web site based on Windows SharePoint Services. When you install Windows SharePoint Services on a single server by using the simple installation method, your default virtual server is extended automatically and a Web site is created. If you are installing Windows SharePoint Services in a more complex environment (for example, hosting multiple sites on a single server, or many sites in a server farm), you must extend each virtual server individually. To extend a new virtual server, perform the following steps:

1. Create the virtual server in Internet Information Services (IIS).

   Note  To complete this procedure, you must be logged on as a member of the Administrators group on the local computer, or you must be logged on using an account that is both a member of the SharePoint administrators group and that has been granted permissions to administer IIS.

2. If necessary, connect to the configuration database for the server farm.
3. Extend the virtual server by using SharePoint Central Administration pages or the command line.

How does extending a virtual server interact with the databases?

Windows SharePoint Services relies on databases to store all data for a virtual server, including both configuration settings and site content. When you extend a virtual server and configure a site, you interact with two different databases:

• Configuration database    The configuration database maintains connections between servers and content databases, stores server settings, and identifies which content is to be provided by which virtual servers. There is one configuration database per stand-alone server or per server farm. For more information about the configuration database, see About content and configuration databases.
• Content database   Content databases store data from the sites: both site management data, such as user names and permissions, and content, such as list data and documents from document libraries. You can create as many content databases as you need to support the Web sites on your servers. For a departmental server, you may need only one content database; for a server farm, you may need thousands. For a Web site that is available to members both behind and outside of a firewall (an extranet), you may have one content database linked to two virtual servers with very different URLs. For more information about content databases, see About content and configuration databases.

Before you extend the first virtual server on a server computer, you must create or connect to a configuration database; subsequent virtual servers do not have to be separately registered with the configuration database. When you extend a virtual server, you choose whether to create a new content database or connect to an existing content database.

Connecting to a configuration database (server farm only)

If you are adding a server to a server farm, and provisioning the first virtual server for that server, you must connect to the configuration database for your server farm before you can extend the virtual server. To connect to a configuration database, use the Set Configuration Database Server page. For more information, see Manage the configuration database. After you have connected to the configuration database, you can extend the virtual server.

Extending a virtual server that is already running Microsoft FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions

If you have an existing virtual server running FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions that you would like to upgrade to Windows SharePoint Services, you must uninstall FrontPage Server Extensions and then extend the virtual server. If you wish to preserve the content from your FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions-based site, use the smigrate.exe tool to migrate the content to your new Windows SharePoint Services-based site before uninstalling. For information on smigrate, see About migrating Web sites.

Reasons for extending a virtual server

Generally, you extend a virtual server because you need to add more capacity to your server, whether that server is a departmental server or one of many in your server farm. More capacity can mean either more space for Web site content or more connections to existing Web sites. For example, if you have a site with many visitors, you can have several virtual servers hosting the same content to increase the number of concurrent users that you can support and balance the load for your servers. You can extend a virtual server to do one of the following:

• Contain new content     If you need to provide space for users to create new Web sites, you can extend a new virtual server to contain new content. Note that you can also add space for users by adding more site collections or new content databases to an existing virtual server. For more information about creating top-level Web sites, see About creating sites. For more information about content databases, see Manage the content database.
• Connect to existing content     To have your new virtual server point to a Web site that is already in use, either to allow for more connections to a site or to allow more than one URL to point to a site, you can connect to an existing content database. When you extend a virtual server, you can choose which content database to use. The content databases are actually listed as virtual servers, and the list contains all virtual servers that currently exist on the server (in a single-server setting), or in the server farm. Querying the configuration database generates this list, which is why you must be connected to the configuration database before you can extend a virtual server.

  When you extend and connect to an existing content database, all of the configuration data about the existing virtual server is applied to the new virtual server. Any managed paths are also applied. This means that if virtual server A contains the paths /teams, /sites, and /users, when you extend virtual server B and connect to the content database for virtual server A, virtual server B will also have the /teams, /sites, and /users paths. You can direct a user to either virtual server A or B, and the user will see the same content — A and B are essentially mirrored virtual servers. For more information about URLs in Windows SharePoint Services, see the Windows SharePoint Services Resource Kit.

When you extend a virtual server, you must supply the following information:

• The application pool to use for the virtual server.
• The user account and e-mail address for the owner of the default top-level Web site for the virtual server.
• The content database to use for storing data for sites on the virtual server.

• Which URL to use for your top-level Web site (optional). The default is to create the top-level Web site at the root of the virtual server, but you can specify a custom URL path instead.
• Which quota template to apply, if you are using quotas on your server (optional).
• The language to use for the default top-level Web site (select from the set of Windows SharePoint Services languages installed on your server).
• Which site template to apply to the top-level Web site (optional). On the command line, you can specify which template to apply to the top-level Web site in the same command that you use to extend the virtual server. You can choose the template from SharePoint Central Administration as well, but you must go to the site to do so.

Related Topics

About content and configuration databases

Specify configuration database settings

Extend a virtual server

About creating sites