On which server does Timer Jobs Run on? (In a medium farm)

Question

We are going to build a medium farm and would like to split the timer jobs across the CA and WFE server.

How do I set which timer job runs on which server?

Answer 1

Are you referring to out of the box or custom timer jobs?

You can use the "Timer Job Status" page within Central Administration to view scheduled and running jobs - the "Server" column shows you where the job is being run.

I am not aware of a means of directly changing where a timer job will run. However, it's worth noting that the location is likely tied to the services that are running on each server. For example, stopping the "Web Analytics Data Processing Service" on a server will have a knock on effect on the corresponding timer jobs that are run. A timer job acts as a trigger to start a specific Windows service.

For development purposes, the SPJobDefinition.LockType Property determines whether the job runs on one server only or on all servers in a farm. I would not recommend using this approach to modify the OOB timer jobs as I'm not sure that it's supported.

Answer 2

TimerJobs can take an SPServer as constructor parameter. I've seen this but never used it before, so no idea if it'll work. Using SPJobDefinition.LockType.Job locks it on 1 specific machine, but you'll have no guarantee which one that'll be.

Answer 3

We can use the manage the Timer job as below

protected SPJobDefinition(
    string name,
    SPService service,
    SPServer server,
    SPJobLockType lockType
)
 and this we can call from feature receiver and we can set all the parameter 

public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)
 {
        SPServerCollection servers = SPFarm.Local.Servers;

          SPServer myServer = servers["myExistingServer"];
          myServer.Name = "NewServerName";
          myServer.Role = SPServerRole.Application;
          myServer.Update();
          TimerJob timerJob = new TimerJob("JobName", SPService,myServer ,SPJobLockType.Job );
            SPDailySchedule schedule = new SPDailySchedule();
            schedule.BeginHour = 3;
            schedule.BeginMinute = 0;
            schedule.EndMinute = 30;
            schedule.EndHour = 3;
            timerJob.Schedule = schedule ;
            timerJob.Update();

      }