So I guess I'm not the only one a lttile confused by the installation of multiple server.

What I've found is this.

Central Admin will be installed on our first WFE server and it will run on only one server.  When you're  adding additional servers, you get an advanced setting that will allow the new server to steal Central Admin from a previously configured server.  You avoid any nastiness by installing your designated CA server first.

Second, all your IIS web apps will be deployed on all your WFE servers.  I think, if you turn off the Web App Service on a particular server, those web apps will dissappear from IIS.

You can run the indexing service on only one server.  If that server is also running the Web App service, it will have a  local copy of the web apps that it can crawl and you can configure the indexing service to only  use that server for crawling.

Right now, I'm running through the CA Admin tasks and I'm getting an error trying to schedule the index crawls.  I'm going to write a post about it and then I'm going to come back to this topic of services on servers in a three server farm.

-robot