Possible value for server role

Question

I am trying to see what are possible values for Server Role property in SharePoint Farm

Below is the command I am using to see all servers and their roles.

Get-SPServer | Select Role

What I am getting currently is Invalid and Application.

Answer 1

You can find a list of possible values for the Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPServerRole enumeration in the corresponding MSDN article.

These are:

• Invalid: Specifies that the server does not have a registered role in the configuration database.
• WebFrontEnd: Specifies that the server is a front-end Web server within the SharePoint Foundation deployment.
• Application: Specifies that the server runs a Web application.
• SingleServer: Specifies that the server is the only server in the SharePoint Foundation deployment.

According to the TechNet article "Add web or application servers to farms in SharePoint 2013" SharePoint "itself" determines the SPServerRole according the running services on each server (choosing between Application and WebFrontEnd).

Determine server role

To add a new server to the farm, you must know its intended role to plan for additional or specialized configurations and assess the potential effect of adding the server to a production environment.

[...]

After you determine the role of the server in your farm topology, you must identify the services and features that must be configured for the server to meet this role. This information will determine how SharePoint 2013 is configured to provision the server for its role in either the web tier or the application tier.

Also a server hosting Central Administration is considered to be an application server:

Application server role

By default, the server that hosts Central Administration in a three-tier farm is an application server. You can add application servers to host services that can be deployed to a single server and used by all the servers in a farm.

Answer 2

Another option that select servers and check if "Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application" service was started on it.

Get-SPServer | Select Name,Role, @{Name="IsWFE";Expression={$_.ServiceInstances | Where {$_.TypeName -eq "Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application"} }  }