Introducing the SharePoint Hierarchy

SharePoint sites are a part of the hierarchy that is important to understand. At the top of this hierarchy is the SharePoint farm. A SharePoint farm represents everything in a SharePoint installation—the servers that include your web front-end servers (these are the ones that serve the web pages), index server, database servers, and all other servers that may provide different types of services. The SharePoint farm includes the IIS websites, including the Central Administration, Windows services, web services, and everything else related to a SharePoint installation.

One level down from the SharePoint farm are the SharePoint web applications. The SharePoint web applications are ASP.NET web applications with configurations that turn them into SharePoint web applications. The Central Administration is one of the important web applications.