And yet one more SharePoint question from MCM yesterday.
What kind of HA do you provision for your SharePoint search databases? I heard from one admin of a very, very large SharePoint farm that they don't have a redundant copy of the search database and they repopulate it if it gets lost. The problem is that to recrawl their 43 million items takes 8 weeks.
I'm not a SharePoint expert, but I'm guessing that without a fully functional search database, functionality is going to be degraded. Does 8 weeks sound right for this? That seems astronomically slow. What's your experience?
Thanks!
Best Answer
I work with a system that does about 112 million files. A full crawl takes about 3 weeks.
I would say this is up to how you setup crawlers for the farm. Multiple index servers would be best for this to help spread the load out.
My best advice is to put all the db's on the same HA cluster if it is that important to you. However, search databases are, by design, meant to be regenerated.
Will functionality be degraded? only search in that your queries will only return against data that has been crawled. Content will be fine still.