Professional Microsoft® Search: FAST Search, SharePoint® Search, and Search Server

Chapter 8. Customization and Deployment of FAST ESP 5.X

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Looking at how ESP scales up across multiple machines to handle more content and searches

• Understanding ESP subsystems and how they scale

• Understanding the effects of networked storage

• Managing virtualization and ESP

• Working with multinode installations

• Working with Linux and Solaris installations

• Using the Document Processing Pipeline

This chapter defines the basic components of Microsoft FAST Enterprise Search Platform 5.x. FAST ESP. The main focus is understanding multinode installations. Why and how are extra machines added to an ESP installation, and how are processes allocated? Multinode setup is the cornerstone of most ESP production installations. Additional configuration for Unix and Linux systems are considered.

FAST ESP is a highly scalable, robust search platform that can be customized. In addition to scalability, ESP can be configured to handle virtually any type of data, given enough customization effort. On the front end ESP offers virtually every results list navigator in the industry, although those can also take some effort to fully utilize, and very few search applications would ever use all of them.

THE BIG PICTURE: WHY IT'S BUILT THIS WAY

Virtually all production FAST systems are multinode, for both scalability and reliability. Even for a small number of documents and light search traffic, production search systems are usually deployed on a minimum of three nodes to allow for failover.

In the ...