Federation information identifies your federation deployment to your partners, according to the protocols you support.
You must provide an ID that uniquely identifies your federation gateway for each protocol you support. For WS-Trust security token service (STS), IDs are required for both SAML 2.0 and SAML 1.x, regardless of browser-based single sign-on (SSO) protocol support or the type of token expected to be issued, to ensure that the STS will perform correctly under all conditions.
Each ID normally applies across all connection partners for a given protocol. However, if your implementation requires different IDs for the same protocol, you can use virtual server IDs. For more information, see Federation planning checklist.