Moving SharePoint Indexes with STSADM

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.

1. Format the new drives on each server
2. Create a new folder on each server to host the indexes
3. I’m going from c:searchindexes to e:searchindexes for my example
4. 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.
5. Login to the Index server
6. To move the index, you need to know the Shared Services name that his using the index.
7. In Central Administration, you will find the name of the Shared Services in the left navigation bar. Mine is using the default – SharedServices1.
8. Open a command prompt and navigate to the BIN directory hosting the stsadm tool
9. Run the following stsadm command – stsadm -o editssp -title sharedservices1 -indexlocation e:searchindexes.

   

10. 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.
11. Next step is to move the search indexes on the query servers. This must be executed on each server locally.
12. Login to the first search server
13. Open a command prompt and navigate to the BIN directory hosting the stsadm tool
14. Execute stsadm -o osearch -propagationlocation e:searchindexes

1. You can go to the Shared Services Search settings page and see the propagation to the new location occur.
2. Delete the old indexes.
3. I had to restart the Office SharePoint Search service on the server to get search functioning.
4. Repeat and rinse on the second search server.
5. Test that search works on both web front end servers.
6. 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.