Enterprise Search Architectures for SharePoint Server 2013 2012 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. To send feedback about this documentation, please write to us at ITSPDocsmicrosoft.com. 2013 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. To send feedback about this documentation, please write to us at ITSPdocsmicrosoft.com.Hardware requirements and scaling considerationsThe requirements apply to each of the servers in the small, medium or large Enterprise Search topology. You can deploy search topologies for the enterprise on physical hardware or on virtual machines.Note: For evaluation use, you can place all search components on one server with 8GB RAM.Example search topologiesThis farm is intended to provide a dedicated search farm with fault tolerance for up to 100 million items in the search index.Large search farm (100M Items)Host BApplication ServerQuery processingHost AApplication ServerIndex partition 0ReplicaReplicaApplication ServerApplication ServerIndex partition 1ReplicaReplicaApplication ServersHost DApplication ServerQuery processingHost CApplication ServerIndex partition 2ReplicaReplicaApplication ServerApplication ServerIndex partition 3ReplicaReplicaHost BHost BApplication ServerQuery processingHost EApplication ServerIndex partition 4ReplicaReplicaApplication ServerApplication ServerIndex partition 5ReplicaReplicaHost HApplication ServerQuery processingHost GApplication ServerIndex partition 6ReplicaReplicaApplication ServerApplication ServerIndex partition 7ReplicaReplicaHost FHost JApplication ServerHost IApplication ServerIndex partition 8ReplicaReplicaApplication ServerApplication ServerIndex partition 9ReplicaReplicaHost LHost KHost NHost MMinimum hardware requirements for application serversMinimum hardware requirements for database serversThis model illustrates small, medium, and large-size farm architectures that have been tested by Microsoft. The size of each farm is based on the number of items that are crawled and included in the search index. Architecture requirements can vary depending on the composition of the data that is crawled (size of items and formats). The examples illustrate the type of search components needed and how many of each. Use these examples as starting points for planning your own search environments. For more information about search processes and how search components interact, see Search Architectures for SharePoint Server 2013 (http:/go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=258643).OverviewSearch componentsAnalytics processing component Carries out search analytics and usage analytics.AnalyticsContent processing component Carries out various processes on the crawled items, such as document parsing and property mapping.Content processingCrawl component Crawls content based on what is specified in the crawl databases.CrawlSearch administration component Runs system processes that are essential to search. There can be more than one search administration component per Search service application, but only one is active at any given time.AdminQuery processing component Analyzes and processes search queries and results.Query processingIndex component The index component is the logical representation of an index replica.Index partitions You can divide the index into discrete portions, each holding a separate part of the index. An index partition is stored in a set of files on a disk. The search index is the aggregation of all index partitions.Index replicas Each index partition holds one or more index replicas that contain the same information. You have to provision one index component for each index replica. To achieve fault tolerance and redundancy, create additional index replicas for each index partition and distribute the index replicas over multiple application servers.IndexThis farm is intended to provide the full functionality of SharePoint Server 2013 search with fault tolerance for up to 40 million items in the search index. To make this an all-purpose farm, add Web servers (not shown) and the additional application servers and databases that are noted.Medium search farm (40M Items)For a multi-purpose farm, add VMs here to support other application server roles.Up to 4 VMs can be combined onto one physical host if the host has sufficient CPU cores and RAM.Combining all Application Server roles onto one VM requires Windows Server 2012.The search index is stored across replicas. Each replica for a given index partition contains the same data. The data within index replicas is stored in the file system on the server. Each replica is a logical representation of an index component.Host BApplication ServerQuery processingHost AApplication ServerIndex partition 0ReplicaReplicaApplication ServerApplication ServerIndex partition 1ReplicaReplicaApplication ServersHost DApplication ServerHost CApplication ServerIndex partition 2ReplicaReplicaApplication ServerApplication ServerIndex partition 3ReplicaReplicaHost BAnalytic