How to add a new server to the farm to an existing search topology and not lose any search schema settings

Question

We are running SharePoint 2013 on-prem. I detached a Central Admin server that was part of the farm and also had the Crawler, Content Processing, Analytics processing, Query Processing and had a single partition. When I reattached the server to the farm it no longer was part of the search topology with the components specified.

My question is 1) how can I add it to an existing search topology AND 2) I do NOT want to lose any of my Search Schema configurations, Crawl Rules, Results Sources, etc..

I dont mind if the index gets reset, but I can not loose any search schema information and I am afraid cloning the search topology would cause me to lose the Search Schema (Im almost 100% sure it would).

Thanks, Tom

Answer 1

The process is:

• Clone the existing topology
• Add the components to the new Search Server
• Activate the topology

More or less, it'll look something like this:

$si = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceInstance -Local 
$clone = $sa.ActiveTopology.Clone() 
New-SPEnterpriseSearchAdminComponent -SearchTopology $clone -SearchServiceInstance $si 
New-SPEnterpriseSearchContentProcessingComponent -SearchTopology $clone -SearchServiceInstance $si 
New-SPEnterpriseSearchAnalyticsProcessingComponent -SearchTopology $clone -SearchServiceInstance $si 
New-SPEnterpriseSearchCrawlComponent -SearchTopology $clone -SearchServiceInstance $si 
New-SPEnterpriseSearchIndexComponent -SearchTopology $clone -SearchServiceInstance $si -IndexPartition 0 -RootDirectory F:\SearchIndex\0 
New-SPEnterpriseSearchQueryProcessingComponent -SearchTopology $clone -SearchServiceInstance $si 
$clone.Activate()