Virtualization of the Search Role

Third in line for virtualization is the SharePoint server or servers that hold the search role (otherwise known as the search server), which provides SharePoint’s indexing and querying functionality. SharePoint 2010 doesn’t have the same single-index restrictions that SharePoint 2007 did, which makes this role more scalable and allows for more distributed deployment models.

The typical virtualized search server consists of a VM with four virtual processors and 8GB of RAM allocated to it (see Table 12.1), assuming that SharePoint 2010’s out-of-box search functionality is being used. If FAST Search Server 2010 is used, the RAM requirements will be in the 12GB to 16GB range. Like the application server numbers, the search server numbers can vary, depending on how many items are being indexed and how heavy the search requirements are.

The search server needs a single VHD that’s presized in the 50GB to 100GB range for the guest OS and another VHD for the index and query corpus. The size of this VHD will vary, depending on how much full text is indexed from various sources.

The crawler component is used by SharePoint to crawl documents for search purposes. Multiple crawl components can be created on different servers for redundancy.

In smaller organizations, the search role is often combined with the web role. Combining these roles can increase the memory and processor requirements of the guest session.