Every SharePoint farm starts with a single server. If you are expanding your SharePoint infrastructure using one of the design patterns (such as one of the Search farm architectures) or your own schematic, you'll need to configure which components go where.
Managing the search topology is how you do that. In these next few sections, we'll review how to update or change the search topology based on your goals.
Prerequisites
Before we begin, you'll need to ensure that the following prerequisite configurations have been made:
- SharePoint Server is already installed on all of the servers that you want to use as part of your topology.
- You've mapped out which services will be installed on which hosts.
- Ensure that no crawls have been started and that the index has no content in it (you can verify this through Application Management | Manage Service Applications | Search Service Application | System Administration | System Status; Searchable Items...