Settings up a SharePoint 2010 search index server

Question

I'm currently working on an implementation of SharePoint 2010 server farm for my company, so far I have two SharePoint 2010 servers and a third server running our database. As part of this process I'm working with a contractor who is experienced in SharePoint 2007, and we are trying to make it so that one of our SharePoint servers is running as a pure Index server and are looking for any guides, which show the finer details such as what services we can stop, to minimize resource use and devote the server to indexing content.

So if anyone could provide us with information or a guide it would be appreciated.

Thanks

Michael

Answer 1

You should just join the server to the farm and then go to Central Admin > Farm Search Admin and select Modify Topologies. From there you can select which server to run which roles for search.

Answer 2

If you want to dedicate one server to handler all crawl requests, take a look here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vijgang/archive/2010/04/26/how-to-configure-a-dedicated-web-front-end-for-crawling-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx