SharePoint 2016 Search Service

Question

I am installing a SharePoint 2016 farm, 1 webapp and 1 app server.

With this in mind I was thinking about where to put the elements of the Search;

Admin Component, Query Component, Crawl Component, Search Query and Site Settings Component, Index Component, Content Processing component and Analytics processing component.

As I have not separated search I was unsure whether I should just install these all on both servers or only put them in one or separate them between the two i.e query on web app crawl index on app?

Answer 1

I would recommend everything except the Query Component should go on your app server, so as not to overload the web front end.

Creating a secondary backup copy of the Search Index (i.e. the one stored on disk) on the WFE is also a good idea, if you can, to increase fault tolerance.

Remember to have both servers configured via HOSTS to point all your web apps that will be crawled back to 127.0.0.1 - this saves round-trip time when a crawl is processed.