Search Service Application Architecture in HA/DR

Question

I am looking at some ideas around Search Service with specific focus on :-

1. High Availability
2. Stretched Farm - 4 Wfe's and 4 Apps + SQL Clustering.
3. Minimal / None Manual Steps for DR which is will be done by DR Routers who would notice that PRD is down and direct traffic to DR environment.

Love to hear some real world experiences, even if it is on a smaller / bigger scale of things.

Answer 1

Microsoft publishes fairly good guidance on search, SharePoint high availability and disaster recovery. For example, one relevant recommendation in the Best Practices for backup and recovery is as follows:

Have a recovery environment ready

Prepare for restore testing and disaster recovery by setting up a remote farm. Then you can restore the environment by using the database attach command to upload a copy of the database to the remote farm and redirect users. Similarly, you can set up a standby environment running the same version of software as the production environment so that you can restore the databases and recover documents quickly.

For search, especially with a large search corpus, a recovery environment is a great way to save time in disaster recovery. If you can have a parallel search crawl running at your DR site, you can avoid a lengthy content crawl on recovery.

Answer 2

Been getting a bit creative. I am still not sure how in the world I am going to PowerShell all this. But here goes

Stretched Farm between two Data centers. Cisco Hardware Based Load Balancers will help in shifting traffic from Primary Farm to Secondary Farm. Databases will be mirrored.

Some of the restrictions from a client perspective was not to have SQL Cluster and HA SQL Mirroring.