Search Server 2010 Express farm topology problem (Licensing?)

Question

I'm encountering some problems passing from my test farm to my production farm. The problem I'm facing throws this exception:

This farm is configured with a topology that is not supported by your Microsoft Search Server 2010 Express software license. Contact your administrator to configure your Search Service Application with one partition and index/query components on the same application server or upgrade your software license to an advanced SKU. 

My test farm has 3 machines:

• Frontend
• Application
• DB

My production farm has 4 machines

• 2 x Frontend
• Application
• DB

With a Balancer which decide who cares of the request..

Is this a licensing? Can it be solved other way? (changing some features or what else?

Thank you very much!

Answer 1

The main limitation of Search Server 2010 Express is that all of the Search components should be on a single server.

Can you get into the administration page for the Search Application? If so you need to modify the topology so Admin, Crawl and Index runs on the same server.