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In order to achieve maximum performance, FileMaker Server can be installed across a maximum of three machines. This only comes into play when you want to do web publishing. If you're not going to do web publishing, then this chapter is not for you and you can just go ahead and install everything on one machine. Let's have a look at the different components that make up FileMaker Server and Server Advanced. At the core, of course, there's its own database engine that lets people connect through FileMaker Pro clients, the Admin Console and ODBC JDBC. That last one only if you have FileMaker Server Advanced. If this is all you'll be doing, then this is straightforward, one-machine deployment. If you want to make your solution available through the web, then you'll need a web server. That is provided by the operating system in the form of IAS on Windows and Apache on Mac. And optionally you'll need to add the PHP engine to that, which FileMaker Server can install for you. FileMaker Server also installs its web server module here. That web server module is needed to make a connection to FileMaker's web publishing engine that acts much like a regular FileMaker Pro client for whatever the web users do. So when users connect to their browser, they hit the web server. The web server then passes all FileMaker requests through the web server module to the web publishing engine for processing. All of that can be installed on one machine. If you expect that the web processing part will be very intensive, then you can choose to split off the web server and the web publishing engine on its own machine. And optionally, if your web server will be busy with a lot of non-FileMaker requests, then you can choose to split the roles over three machines. For best performance always let the database engine have its own machine if you're deploying on more than one machine. Note that you can mix and match operating systems in here. The web server can be a Mac and the database engine or master machine can be on Windows. Also note that you're not stuck with the choices you make at the moment of installation. The deployment wizard can be run at any time to adjust the deployment to meet your needs.