Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 Best Practices

Designing Crawl and Query Topologies

We’ll discuss two basic parts in this section. The first is how and when you need to scale out your index and query server topology. The second is understanding the differential assessment points for when you’ll want to make information findable by using the federated query feature in Search Server 2008 and when you’ll want to have that content crawled and indexed locally by SharePoint Server 2007 (if you don’t implement Search Server 2008) or via your Search Server 2008 implementation.

Scaling Out Your Index and Query Servers

In SharePoint Server 2007, you have the option of separating out the index and query server roles to different servers. The index server role performs the crawling and indexing functions. ...