Recently a bunch of people have asked me about the supportability of the approaches to providing “high availability” for SharePoint Central Administration I detailed in my article SharePoint Central Administration: High Availability, Load Balancing, Security & General Recommendations.
This short update is to clarify the situation following discussions with Microsoft Premier Field Engineers on the matter.
Running Central Administration on more than one server in the farm is 100% supported, and indeed a recommended best practice.
Load Balancing Central Administration is 100% supported. And even if it wasn’t it wouldn’t matter as you can simply take load balancing out of the equation and hit one of the machines directly.
Implementing Kerberos Authentication for load balanced Central Administration is 100% supported.
Implementing Central Administration on Port 80 or 443 is 100% supported.
If you are told by someone that the above approaches are unsupported, they are incorrect. Please contact me via this blog and I will follow up with you.
Print | posted on Friday, May 08, 2009 4:37 PM