sharepoint saturday - chicago suburbs 2016: keys to understanding and architecting search

Architecting Search in 2013/2016 On-Prem

Ajay Iyer

Ajay Iyer

• SharePoint Architect• @shankarajay1• http://sharepointadminstuff.wordpress.com• Solution Architecture, Capacity Planning, Search, Migrations,

Enterprise Content Management, Document Imaging and…..InfoPath

http://sharepointadminstuff.wordpress.com/

Outline

• Review Search Components & Terminologies

• Gather Requirements for Search (What specifics should you ask?)

• Search Farm Architecture & Design

• Incremental Crawls or Continuous Crawls?

• What’s new in SP2016 & Search?

Review of Search Components & Terminologies

Review of Search Components

Search Roles

• Search Administration

• Crawl

• Content Processing

• Analytics Processing

• Index

• Query Processing

Search Databases

• Search Administration DB

• Crawl DB

• Analytics Reporting DB

• Link DB

Other Search-related Terminologies

• No. of items in Index

• Search Topology

• Index Partitions

• Content Sources

• Incremental Crawls/Continuous Crawls

• Full Crawls

• Crawled Properties

• Managed Properties

Review of Search Components

CrawlContent

ProcessingIndex

Analytics

Processing

Query

Processing Links

DB

WFEs

Search IndexAnalytics DB

Crawl DB

Crawl DB

Gathering Requirements for Search


• How many web applications & site collections in current environment?

• How many total documents?

• What are the different document file types? PDFs, TIFFs, DOCX, XLSX, etc. ?

• Are the PDF’s, image-only or searchable?

• What’s the frequency of content additions and changes?

• How quickly do the users expect their documents to be searchable, after uploading to SharePoint?

• Are there any Line-Of-Business external applications that interface with SharePoint?

Questions


Questions Response

No. of Web Apps 2

No. of Site Collections 25

Total No. of Documents 3,980,272

Document File Types PDFs (mostly), approx. 25,000 office

documents, approx. 3000 TIFFs

PDF Types Mostly Searchable PDFs, and approx. 2000

Image-Only PDFs

Frequency of content change Approx. 200 documents added per hour

How soon should docs be retrievable from

search

10 minutes or less

Sample Response

Search Farm Architecture & Design


Sample Search Farm Design

DB

Server

WFE 1

WFE 2

APP 1

APP 2

Office Web

Apps

WAWS


Sample Search Farm Design

DB

Server

WFE 1

WFE 2

APP 1

APP 2

Office Web

Apps

WAWS

CRWLR 1

CRWLR 1

Query component

Query component

Crawl/Search Admin components

Crawl/Search Admin components


Crawl & Search Admin Servers:

• 8 vCPUs

• 32GB RAM

• 80GB - System Drive

• 120GB - Data Drive (SP Binaries, Data, Logs)

• 40GB – Drive for Search Index

Search Servers Specifications


Analytics & Content Processing Servers:

• 4 vCPUs

• 16GB RAM





Query Servers:

• 4 vCPUs

• 16GB RAM



• 40GB – Drive for Search Index



Incremental Crawls or Continuous Crawls??


Possible Resolutions:

• Check disk I/O on the SQL server data drive

• Move the Search Databases to a different LUN (if virtual) or DISK (if physical)

• Change the Search Performance level from the default “Maximum” to “Partly

Reduced” or “Reduced”

• Here’s how you fix it using PowerShell

• Check memory utilization on the crawl & query servers

• Look for RAM utilization on the msssearch.exe and noderunner.exe services

https://sharepointadminstuff.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/error-creating-search-topology-in-sharepoint-2013/

What’s new in SP2016

What’s New in SP2016

MinRole

• Auto-Provisioning of SP Services/Service App Endpoints

• Provisioning is based on Server Roles

• Ensures each server in farm is running services it needs

• Farm Admins can manage services at farm-level, not server-level

• Improves farm reliability

• Simplified Capacity Planning

• Choose “Custom” role to manage services on server-level

What’s New in SP2016 Search

• Each Search Service Application now supports indexing up to 500 million items

(SP2013 supported 250 million items)

• Searching for sensitive documents. E.g. documents with SSNs, credit cards, passport

numbers etc. in them, using Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

• Hybrid Search is available in SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint 2013 + September

2015 CU

• Can crawl Office 365 content as well as On-Prem content and get unified results

across both.

Other Notable Changes

• Supports upload & download of files > 2GB

• Filenames can now include special characters

• &, ~, {, } are allowed

• # and % are still NOT allowed

• Search now supports indexing up to 500 million items (SP2013 supported 250

million items)

• STSADM is deprecated! PowerShell is your best friend!

• SharePoint Foundation NOT available for SP2016

• Easy User Profile Synch – Microsoft Identity Manager!

• Excel Services are now part of Excel Online

Upgrade

• SharePoint Server 2013 + March 2013 PU (v15.0.4481.1005) or

higher

• All content databases that need to be upgraded should at least also be on

v15.0.4481.1005

• Use Database Attach Upgrade

• Make sure no site collections/subsites are in 2010 Compatibility

Mode

• Custom code from SP2013 “should” work with SP2016

Source: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt422728(v=office.16).aspx

Farm Requirements

Additional Questions?

Ajay Iyer

• SharePoint Architect• @shankarajay1• http://sharepointadminstuff.wordpress.com• Solution Architecture, Capacity Planning, Search, Migrations,

Enterprise Content Management, Document Imaging and…..InfoPath

http://sharepointadminstuff.wordpress.com/

sharepoint saturday - chicago suburbs 2016: keys to understanding and architecting search

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