The Authoring farm consists of the following:

Authoring Server 1: WFE for the 200 authoring users.

Authoring Sever 2: Central Admin, Application services (Excel, email, index, document, etc..)

The Internet farms consists of the following:

Internet Server 1: WFE – Public URL

Internet Server 2: WFE – Public URL

Internet Server 3: WFE – Internal URL of public URL, Application services (excel, email, docs, index, etc..) plus Central admin.

The Internet Servers 1 and 2 are fronted by dual F5 Big-IP 6400’s with Web accelleration and the SharePoint application pool template.

Why are we using this hardware configuration?

Hardware performance testing that led me to this configuration included running VMWare 32-bit configurations and SQL 2000.

We found that all things being equal SQL 2005 64-bit is roughly 20% faster in serving up content then SQL 2K. This would make sense with the OS at 64-bit and using all 8GB of ram. That should come as no surprise and I hope nobody seriously considers running SQL 2K in any type of large production implementation.  

VMWare or any virtulization software seems to be OK for WSS with a remote sql instance but will not perform well for MOSS unless you allocate so many resources to those server instances that you might as well have purchased a server.

MOSS 64-bit vs 32-bit: 64-bit is clearly faster than 32-bit but I couldn’t tell if that was simply due to the OS using all 8GB of ram.  MOSS loves memory.  Installing 64-bit should have been required as in Exchange 2007.

F5’s Big-IP 6400’s are simply fantastic is performing web acceleration and load balancing for SharePoint.  Our stress tools showed an average 20% decrease in time between first block received when using the web acceleration settings on the Big-IP.

Let me know what you are using or if you find contrary performance indicators!!