SharePoint 2010 - How to calculate the number of Web Front Servers (WFEs) / Web Servers required for my sharePoint 2010 site?

What?
How to calculate the number of Web Front Servers (WFEs) / Web Servers required for a SharePoint 2010 site?

Why?

Capacity Planning in SharePoint 2010 is a complicated and confusing topic and there's not a whole lot of really good documentation around it.

There are so many factors that affect your planning in this area that it is almost impossible for anyone to come up with a solid number. Your performance would be affected by the server hardware, the client hardware, the concurrency rate of your users, the throughput rate required, the response time your organization deems acceptable etc.

SharePoint Search: How to exclude part of a page / partial page from being indexed by SharePoint Search?

What?

How to exclude part of a page / partial page from being indexed by SharePoint Search?
Out of the box, SharePoint provides a mechanism for excluding publishing pages from the search index by any number of criteria, but what if you want to exclude only parts of a page? This becomes useful when you have content on numerous pages that contains common keywords. 

Why?

Scenario 1:

For example, say you have a search results webpart in your page layout to display your latest press release: "Product A just announced". That means all the pages that are created using that page layout will have "Product A" in them.  When someone performs a search for "Product A" they will get back every page in your site that is created using that page layout, instead of just the press release and related product pages. To prevent this, we need to prevent SharePoint from indexing that content when it’s performing a crawl.

OR

Scenario 2:

You want to index a regular non-SharePoint web site. Usually, it’s your company’s public-facing web site. That site has common navigation on every page with terms such as Contact, Locations, Privacy Policy, About, etc. that you don’t want to be indexed. If it is indexed, every time a user types in "contact", they end up having every page on the site returned in the search results.