SharePoint Search with Network Load Balancing (NLB)

Question

SharePoint MOSS 2007 on 64 bit OS and SQL. Added a new Web Front End to our farm, all sites seem to work fine - but now we've noticed that the search service has completely stopped working. It works if I change my host file to point to the original WFE, but if I use the NLB IP or the IP of the new WFE, it says "Unable to Connect to the Search Service.

Help.

Answer 1

As someone who was recently a sharepoint developer one of the biggest issues I have come across is load balanced environments. Does your alternate access mapping file contain the proper references?

Answer 2

The way we do it is to keep one WFE outside the NLB and have the indexer use that machine. Not only is this better for performance (the separate WFE serves the indexer only, regular traffic goes through the NLB. This way, indexing doesn't interfere with regular users visiting the site)

The other pro is that you circumvent issues like this.

P.S. This question DOES belong on serverfault though, voted to move..

Answer 3

I just setup a new medium farm MOSS 2007 x64 environment and ran into a few snags. This is what we ended up doing:

• 2 WFEs, 1 Index, 1 SQL - all running Windows 2008 Server
• The 2 WFEs have an NLB cluster configured and host queries (but not indexing).
• The Index is also a WFE, is NOT part of the cluster, hosts indexing (but not queries).
• The Index had to have the loopbackcheck disabled and a hosts file entry setup to point the portal DNS name to 127.0.0.1. Without those settings it was generating errors. With these settings, it can index itself without affecting the portal performance while still being able to replicate its index to the query servers.

Hope that helps.