Our disk drives for the SharePoint indexes arrived after SharePoint was configured. I had to move the Indexes on the search and index servers. Here’s how I did it.
- Format the new drives on each server
- Create a new folder on each server to host the indexes
- I’m going from c:searchindexes to e:searchindexes for my example
- I have a medium server farm (SPS 2003 terminology) which consists of 2 web front end servers also hosting the query role. I have a dedicated index server.
- Login to the Index server
- To move the index, you need to know the Shared Services name that his using the index.
- In Central Administration, you will find the name of the Shared Services in the left navigation bar. Mine is using the default – SharedServices1.
- Open a command prompt and navigate to the BIN directory hosting the stsadm tool
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Run the following stsadm command – stsadm -o editssp -title sharedservices1 -indexlocation e:searchindexes.
- Once the index has been moved, delete the old index. I have not found a definitively way to determine when the move is complete. There are event log entries stating something happened. My index is 16 MB so it may have moved in seconds.
- Next step is to move the search indexes on the query servers. This must be executed on each server locally.
- Login to the first search server
- Open a command prompt and navigate to the BIN directory hosting the stsadm tool
- Execute stsadm -o osearch -propagationlocation e:searchindexes
- You can go to the Shared Services Search settings page and see the propagation to the new location occur.
- Delete the old indexes.
- I had to restart the Office SharePoint Search service on the server to get search functioning.
- Repeat and rinse on the second search server.
- Test that search works on both web front end servers.
- Since we are using windows network load balancing, I had to create alternate access mappings for the server name URL of each front end server. Enjoy.
