Sharepoint 2013 farm Configuration services

Question

I have a farm in sharepoint 2013 with a 3 level topology, I'm a little novice at this.

I need to configure some services, the distribution of the farm is:

Server DB
Server Central Administration
Server Administration Services
Server Front End 1
Server Front End 2.

which of the servers do the configuration of my user profile service for example?

Answer 1

which of the servers do the configuration of my user profile service for example?

As a short answer : The application services like user profile synchronization service ... etc will be configured on the Application Server that host the Central Administration .

To avoid confusion you should know the difference between web server role and application server role

Front-end web server role

• The fundamental role of a front-end web server is to host web pages, web services, and the Web Parts that are required to process requests from users. The web server directs these requests to the application server, which returns the results to the front-end web 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.

For more details check Add web or application servers to farms in SharePoint 2013

Answer 2

Your user profile can go one of the central admin or service server.

But if you plan the search service application on services server then I would configure the UPA on central admin box.

Also another thing keep in mind, if you are us my ADI rather then user profile sync the. You can run this service on any server as MSFT recommend to run it on WFE.

But if you are using full sync then Atleast sync should be run on the app server.

Read this guideline for both streamline and traditional topologies.

Answer 3

The User Profile Service should run on your FEs while your User Profile Synchronization Service (should you use it) should reside on your App layer. This is standard with the streamlined topologies.