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we have SP 2013 production environment with search items approximately 6 Million.

We are planning to do index partition once search items reach 10 Million items.

We are having topology with two Search servers and all components (admin, content processing, crawl, index, query components) configured in both search servers.

Search index partition is zero and search index primary component is on server 1 and replica on server 2.

My question is, for creating new search index partition, are we able to do it in the existing servers with adding separate disk space for new partition or do we need to go for additional/new SP servers with extending the existing search topology?

Please clarify.

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  • FWIW, If you upgrade to 2016 you will be able to have 20M items in a single Index Partition.
    – Matthew McDermott
    Commented Mar 21, 2017 at 12:06

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The solution really depends on your budget. Scaling with additional search servers isn't always within budget, though if it is, that would be my recommended course of action.

That being said, if budget is a constraint, you can go the route of adding disks to the existing servers BUT, there are some things to be keenly aware of. This is where it's vitally important to have a hardware admin that has a thorough grasp on the carving up of luns and spindles in your SAN. If the new disks being added, are simply added from the already provisioned SAN space, you will gain nothing performance wise. It is vitally important that the new lun carved out for your new disks NOT share the same spindles as the index 0 disks. Ideally, you'd have three luns, one for the search server OS and apps, one for partition 0 and one for partition 1. None of the luns should be sharing spindles on the SAN side.

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  • Hi , I am not bit clear about sharing same spindles​ with zero index partition does not show any impact. We are planning for adding separate disk from San for index 1 partition with out mixing index zero drive . Will it have no performance impact?? Can u pls share any reference link about this on spindles consideration??
    – anil kumar
    Commented Mar 24, 2017 at 11:35
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It depends on your organisation , if you are really looking to optimize the performance and your searchable items get growing - you really need to look for partitioning the Indexes. Microsoft tells that every 10 million items need to be in separate index for optimum performance.

Again @Cornelius points can be taken into consideration - on How you going to do that part on how additional space in existing servers going to get added.

You can either go for increasing the space in exisiting machine and get your index partitioned.

Or if you have more budget you can add one more server with Search role , and do index partition.

Please read this Microsoft Reference

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  • Thanks John. We are planning to add index within existing servers without going for new server
    – anil kumar
    Commented Mar 24, 2017 at 11:31

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