Add Application Server to existing SharePoint farm - production hours

Question

I'm required to add a new application server on an existing production farm where there are hunderds of active users accessing the portal sites currently.

My farm toplogy is like this :-

2 WFE
1 SEARCH & INDEXING
1 DB Cluster

I want to know what should be the recommended way (like sequence of shutdown of iis, etc) of adding a new application server to the existing farm and how much downtime should be required.

Answer 1

This article will be helpful : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261752.aspx

Answer 2

I know it's an old thread but for others benefit I'm going to attempt to answer your 2nd part of the question (which does not seem to be addressed directly). There should not be any downtime for just adding a new server to the farm.

Thank you!

Answer 3

The main downtime will probably be transferring the service applications to the new application server. Guessing it depends on the services you are going to transfer to the dedicated application server. Search would be the main pain point I would imagine, that and the infernal User Profile Service Application, make sure you're firewall ports are open and proxy server settings are taken out of the equation when doing that one.

Not having done it personally good luck! (I'm guessing its SharePoint 2010 here as well)