Sunday, June 13, 2010

Fast Search Server 2010 for SharePoint Installation and Configuration

The home page of Fast Search Server 2010 for SharePoint: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/enterprisesearch/ee441234.aspx is a must read in order to get started on this.

I won't bore you with detailed steps setting up FAST on SharePoint for a development environment since above link has many pages of detailed instructions, I will just point out some issues I ran into and the resolutions of those.

First, you can install FAST on SharePoint server. For my development environment, I have SharePoint 2010 and FAST on the same server, and databases are on a separate SQL server.

After the installation, during the configuration, If you run into error about "Username or domain is incorrect", please use full domain name, please see this post on TechNet. You can use "ping -a servername" to find out the FQDN.

After I have setup everything, I got the error message "The search request was unable to connect to the Search Service". After ensuring that the SharePoint certificate is copied to the FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint query processing node, the search works like a charm.


Also I created a new site based on FAST Search Center template and made necessary changes to My Site and the Portal to ensure that SharePoint uses FAST as the search provider. Please see the bottom of this post for directions on this.

Good luck with your FAST installation and configuration.

 

3 comments:

  1. Have you ever tried re-installing FAST, if yes have u faced any issues what are the steps to be taken care
    can we delete existing indexes
    can we store the index in a separate storage drive

    ReplyDelete
  2. No I have not tried to re-install FAST. Yes you can delete existing indexes by "Index Reset". I have not done storing the index in a separate storage drive, but as long as the storage drive is mapped to the server, I think it should work.

    ReplyDelete
  3. In terms of performance how do you find it? MS basically recommend installing FAST on a different server due to the high resources required for both Fast and SharePoint. What are your specs of your environment?

    ReplyDelete