What/Where is the SharePoint App server, where to point the DNS

Question

I am trying to setup the SharePoint 2013 farm for apps.

We have 2 farms:

Test DB Server Test Central Admin Test Front End 1 Test Front End 2

Prod DB Server Prod Central Admin Prod Front End 1 Prod Front End 2

and a Content Server that will eventually publish to prod and or test.

I am working on the Content Server. I created the web applications, site collection and solution installed and ready. The App Management Service and Subscription service is running.

Now I need to install my app part so I need to setup my farm for apps...

So out of all these machines what should the app domain be?

I have created an app domin, for example, appsmycorp.com. Where machine on the farm should this "point" to?

Answer 1

Your SharePoint Servers are your "app" servers.

You will create a wildcard CNAME record in your app domain that points back to your SharePoint server DNS record. Make sure that the the farm that receives it does not have host headers configured on the webapp that the requests will be delivered too. On production using SSL you will have to extend or create another webapp since you can't bind multiple SSL certificates.

You can utilize the same zone for both production and dev by utilizing sub domains. for example:

prod.appsmycorp.com (A)*.prod.appsmycorp.com --> Prod farm IP dev.appsmycorp.com (A) *.dev.appsmycorp.com --> Dev farm IP

Bear in mind that you need 2 wildcard certificates (if using SSL ), one for each sub-domain, you can't use one for the primary domain (appsmycorp.com) with this scenario.

Tech net has a good starting point (and there are plenty of examples on the net): http://blogs.technet.com/b/mspfe/archive/2013/01/31/configuring-sharepoint-on-premise-deployments-for-apps.aspx