Where do you host the SSP and admin web apps?
SSP web app? Admin web app? By looking at the out-of-the-box options you can easily get confused. While I'm sure some postings already exist on this subject, I've gotten two questions about this recently which exceeds my criteria for posting. :-)
The SharePoint and SSP administration sites do not correspond to any underlying server functionality. They simply provide access to the administration options for SharePoint and the other services you configured as part of the services on server page. https://yourserver:admin/_admin/server.aspx so deploying these sites do not result in any additional overhead and should be deployed to other servers just in case the default server is not available. Feel free to put these sites on every server in your farm that runs the web application service. This way you'll be able to get to these critical sites as long as one web server is up and running. To deploy the sites to each web server:
1. Go to https://yourserver:adminport/_admin/AlternateUrlCollections.aspx and choose add internal urls.
2. Choose the alternate access mapping collection that corresponds to the administration site from the drop down box at the top right.
3. Enter the address for the new web server as follows:
4. Choose the appropriate zone from the zone drop down (if in doubt go with custom) and Save the form.
5. Repeat steps 1 through 4 for each web server in your farm.
6. To configure the SSP administration site to be available on multiple webs repeat steps 1 through 5 except in step 2 choose the SSP admin site instead.
You can also create hostheader value for these sites and use NLB to load balance requests across servers; however, that seems like too much fuss to me.