Azure & Office 365

Posts Tagged ‘SharePoint server’

Web Applications are one of the very important and bit what confusing topic in SharePoint. Let me try to simplify the same. If you have worked on IIS, we create IIS site which are the actual URL of IIS site. You specify hostheader and port number while creating a IIS site. We then use the same URL with port number to browse our IIS site(e.g. https://itfreesupport.com:8081 or http://computername:80). We create a Web Application from SharePoint central admin which creates sites in IIS so we can say that SharePoint Web Applications are IIS sites but managed and created from SharePoint Central Admin.

Each Web Application created in SharePoint central admin is associated with a IIS site. We cannot have multiple web Application for one IIS site but we can create upto 5 IIS sites for one Web application(using Extend Web Application feature). This means we can browse same content from different URL’s using different IIS sites\web.config files.

Microsoft support upto 20 Web Application in a SharePoint farm but we can create more then 20 Web applications.

Every Web Application will have minimum 1 content database but there is not hard core limit of databases a Web Application can have. Microsoft supports upto 500 content databases in a SharePoint farm so technically you can have upto 500 content databases for single web application.

On your SharePoint server under services on server, if you have “Microsoft SharePoint Foundation web Application” service running\started, it states this server a WFE(Web front end) server. End users will access your SharePoint sites and services through these WFE servers.

Another very important feature of Web Application is authentication method for SharePoint site. We set authentication method\type(Claims authentication, NTLM authentication, Anonymous authentication, etc) at Web Application level. As discussed already you can have 5 IIS site(extended web application) for a single web application which means you can have 5 different types of authentication for same web application.

We can create Web Application using Powershell, command prompt(cmd) or through SharePoint Central Admin.

To create a new Web Application through powershell using powershell command:
$ap = New-SPAuthenticationProvider
New-SPWebApplication -Name “Itfreesupport” -Port 80 -HostHeader “itfreesupport.com” -URL “https://itfreesupport.com” -ApplicationPool “AppPool” -ApplicationPoolAccount (Get-SPManagedAccount “domain\user”) -AuthenticationProvider $ap

To create a new Web Application through stsadm command follow below:
stsadm -o extendvs -url https://itfreesupport.com -ownerlogin domain\user -owneremail “[email protected]”

To create a new Web Application through central admin follow below:
Open SharePoint Central Admin > Select “Application management” > Select “Manage Web Application” > Select “New” on top ribbon > Complete the details e.g. port number, host header url, etc and click OK

Hope this was helpful