Crawl Component Removal Impact

Question

After a hardware maintenance of the application servers on our farm, we started getting some Load Balancer Endpoint errors on the Search Service. I had this before with the User Profile Service and stopping/starting the service trough SP Management Shell resolved.

We tried the same approach with the Search Service on one of the servers with endpoint failures and the service didnt stop. Also on Central Admin it is displayed as Error Stopping. Only then I realized that we must remove the server from the Search Topology before stopping the service, as the error in Central Admin clearly states:

Invalid search service unprovisioning: application 'Enterprise Search Service Application' still has a ready component 'XXXXXXX' on server 'XXXXX'.

This server is in the search topology as a Crawl Component, along with another server, making it two servers exclusive for Crawl Component. If I remove the failing server from the search topology, will I lose any index or information regarding search? What is the impact of removing it?

Answer 1

No, there will be no loss of Index, since the Index component is another component and in your case on another server. When the Crawl component fails, no new content can be crawled which leads to that no new content will be processed by the Content Processing Component. Thus no new indexed content will be added to the Index component.

The process of recreating a component by cloning the search topology is explained in detail in another answer to a slightly different question - but with the same impact. See Clone Search Topology