Service App custom groups and multi-instance scenarios

Question

Have you deployed custom Service Application groups and/or deployed multiple instances of a Service Application? If so, I'm looking for specific examples I can use for our OnPrem SharePoint 2010 governance.

I understand there are numerous scenarios that could drive this (e.g. Search, BCS, Multi-tenant, Info Security). What caused you to do this? What were your decision points?

Answer 1

In our setup we have a dedicated Services Farm that hosts our default Service Applications. The service farm is hosting our MySites and UserProfile Service (along with several others). We have a collaboration farm that uses the service farm for everything except service applications that cannot be shared across farms. We also have a hotel farm which is used to host applications that do not meet our standards for hosting in the collaboration farm. One of those applications is our BI Portal. For the BI Portal we configured a separate service application profile with the services that were important for the BI solution. This was done so we could isolate the BI application with the idea that we would create a dedicated BI farm at some point in the future.