Add a WFE or an App Server to a Single Server Farm?

Question

My customer has a single server farm with one SharePoint Server and one SQL server. We have identified that the SharePoint Server lacks performance at times and we need to scale out the farm with an additional server.

Should we add a WFE or an App Server?

Answer 1

The farm setup currently in your customer's premise is a two tier farm topology. You must scale out the Application Server to make it three tier farm topology.

You can add a new server to the farm by installing SharePoint Server setup and connect it to the existing farm. While configuring this new server you should create/move your Service Applications in this new server. Others may opt to only separate the Search Service Application on the new server and make it as a Search Server. Search Service is at the top that needs most of the server resources and affects the performance if server running low on server resources.

Add an Application Server to your existing farm.

For your understanding you may refer this well explained article:

How to Scale Out a SharePoint Farm From Two-Tier to Three-Tier By Adding A Dedicated Application Server