MinRole overview in SharePoint 2016

SharePoint 2016 is taking a very different approach on roles and services. In SharePoint 2013, whether your server was a "search server" or a "distributed cache server" was all determined by what services you ran on it.

In 2016, that get a new wrinkle added to it through the use of MinRoles. MinRoles apply a set of services to a server based on the role you assign it during installation.

SharePoint automatically configures the services on each server based on the server's role. Any services running on those servers that are not in that predefined role, or stopped services that should be running, will cause health monitors to report that the server is out of compliance.

Note: You cannot choose to have the servers be multiple roles. If you want a server to perform multiple role functions, you’ll want to select "Custom" during the installation, which will let you pick and choose the services on the server in the same way as you do in SharePoint 2013.

SharePoint Server 2016 has six Server roles to choose in server installations:

Front-end: Service Application, services,and components that serve user requests. These servers are optimized for fast performance.

Application: Service Application, services,and components that serve back-end requests. Like search crawl, timerjobs. These servers are optimized for high throughput.

Distributed Cache: Service Application, services,and components that are required for a distributed cache. Optionally, you configure these server to load balance farm traffic.

Search: Service Application, services,and components that are required for search.

Custom: Custom service applications, services, and components that are outside of MinRole topology. The farm administrator has full control over which service instances can run on servers.

Single server farm: 

Service applications, services, and components required for a single-machine farm. A Single-Server Farm is meant for development, testing, and very limited production use. A SharePoint farm with the Single-Server Farm role cannot have more than one SharePoint server in the farm.

Note:

The Standalone Install mode is no longer available in SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview. The Single-Server Farm role replaces the Standalone Install mode available in previous SharePoint Server releases. With 2016 you don't get SQL  Express included in the installation. The SharePoint administrator must separately install and prepare Microsoft SQL Server for SharePoint.

MinRole Topologies:      

Server role	* Content Farm ?	*Shared Services Farm ?	*Search Farm ?
Front-end web	Yes	No	No
Application	Yes	Yes	No
Distributed cache	Yes	Yes	No
Search	Yes, if hosting Search	Yes, if hosting Search	Yes
Custom	Optional	Optional	Optional