How to Scale Out a SharePoint 2010 Farm From Two-Tier to Three-Tier by Adding a Dedicated Application Server

Three-Tier SharePoint Farm

Microsoft provides some good documentation on different SharePoint 2010 Farm deployment scenarios in the TechNet Library.  One of those is about how to deploy a three-tier SharePoint 2010 Farm, which is the second most common topology for a SharePoint farm.

from an existing two-tier SharePoint 2010 Farm (the most common SharePoint Farm topology).

A lot of SharePoint Server Farm Administrators eventually get to the point where they need to scale out and the most commonly desired way to do it is to add a dedicated Application Server and move the SharePoint 2010 Service Applications to it (shown in the diagram to the right).

I have written a detailed blog post with screenshots on our SharePoint Help site that walks through how to add a dedicated application server to an existing SharePoint 2010 two-tier farm:

http://sharepointsolutions.com/sharepoint-help/blog/2011/02/how-to-scale-out-a-sharepoint-2010-farm-from-two-tier-to-three-tier-by-adding-a-dedicated-application-server/