Can i make my web front end server as Crawl server.
Ans) It's not suggestable.
Reason:
The reason for a crawl target is to limit the user impact of the Search Crawl on your Production farm. Crawling will hammer your Front End servers due to massive amount of requests for content. If you set up a crawl target (dedicate a box directly for search crawls) then users will be not impacted by your heavy performance crawl in-progress
How to stop Crawl in WFE.
Disable HTTP throttling on the crawl target so no crawl requests will be queued or delayed on the Front End machine. Open up a SharePoint Management Console (PowerShell) and run this script
$svc=[Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebServiceInstance]::LocalContent
$svc.DisableLocalHttpThrottling
$svc.DisableLocalHttpThrottling=$true
$svc.Update()
How to setup a dedicated Crawl Server.
To set the farm to distribute crawl traffic to only the Front End that is specified as your crawl target, in this example : Server1 is my crawl target and http://sharepoint is my farm name. Run this in the same or seperate instance of PowerShell.
$env:farmurl = "http://sharepoint"
$env:crawltarget = "server1"
$listOfUri = new-object System.Collections.Generic.List[System.Uri](1)
$zoneUrl = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPUrlZone]'Default'
$webappUrl = $env:farmurl
$webapp = Get-SPWebApplication -Identity $webappUrl
$webApp.SiteDataServers.Remove($zoneUrl)
$listOfUri.Add("http://$env:crawltarget");
$webApp.SiteDataServers.Add($zoneUrl, $listOfUri);
$WebApp.Update()
You have successfully setup your crawl target, now your Search crawls can perform with high performance without impacting users on your farm.
Ans) It's not suggestable.
Reason:
The reason for a crawl target is to limit the user impact of the Search Crawl on your Production farm. Crawling will hammer your Front End servers due to massive amount of requests for content. If you set up a crawl target (dedicate a box directly for search crawls) then users will be not impacted by your heavy performance crawl in-progress
How to stop Crawl in WFE.
Disable HTTP throttling on the crawl target so no crawl requests will be queued or delayed on the Front End machine. Open up a SharePoint Management Console (PowerShell) and run this script
$svc=[Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebServiceInstance]::LocalContent
$svc.DisableLocalHttpThrottling
$svc.DisableLocalHttpThrottling=$true
$svc.Update()
How to setup a dedicated Crawl Server.
To set the farm to distribute crawl traffic to only the Front End that is specified as your crawl target, in this example : Server1 is my crawl target and http://sharepoint is my farm name. Run this in the same or seperate instance of PowerShell.
$env:farmurl = "http://sharepoint"
$env:crawltarget = "server1"
$listOfUri = new-object System.Collections.Generic.List[System.Uri](1)
$zoneUrl = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPUrlZone]'Default'
$webappUrl = $env:farmurl
$webapp = Get-SPWebApplication -Identity $webappUrl
$webApp.SiteDataServers.Remove($zoneUrl)
$listOfUri.Add("http://$env:crawltarget");
$webApp.SiteDataServers.Add($zoneUrl, $listOfUri);
$WebApp.Update()
You have successfully setup your crawl target, now your Search crawls can perform with high performance without impacting users on your farm.