Leveraging and Optimizing Search in SharePoint 2010 : Deploying FAST Search Service Applications

FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint requires two service applications to function properly:

• The FAST Content SSA is responsible for crawling and feeding content for the FAST backend. Its configuration contains all the content sources except People.

• The FAST Query SSA is responsible for serving the queries and crawling the People content source. This service routes the People Search to the SharePoint 2010 Search engine, and all of other queries to the FAST Search Engine.

Because of that, the deployment of these services is more complex than in the case of SharePoint 2010 Search. To build your FAST Search configuration, first you have to create the FAST Content SSA, and then create the FAST Query SSA. For getting the detailed information of your FAST Server configuration, open the file install_info.txt file, as shown in Figure 8.13, in the FASTSearch folder; you will need it during the configuration.

Figure 1. The install_info.txt file located in the FASTSearch folder.

Follow these steps to create a FAST Content SSA:

1.	Go to the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration site, choose Application Management, Service Applications, Manage service applications.
2.	Click New and choose the action Search Service Application.
3.	Type the name of your Search Service Application (for example, FAST Content SSA).
4.	Choose the type of the Search Service Application for FAST Search Connector.
5.	Select the Application Pool for the Search Service Application, or create a new one.
6.	Provide the location of the Content Distributor(s). The location can be found in the install_info.txt file (for example, fastsearch.companyabc.com:13391) but be careful because this port number (13391) is for HTTPS communication. If you would like to communicate by HTTP, the correct port number is 13390 (port number provided in the install_info.txt minus 1).
7.	Set the name of the content collection that will hold the content of this connector. By default, the name of the collection is sp.
8.	Click OK, and save your changes.

After performing these steps, your FAST Content SSA is ready to be used and connected to the content sources. Content Sources can be configured immediately by the preceding steps.

The next FAST Query Service Application can be deployed by performing the following steps:

1.	Go to the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration site, choose Application Management, Service Applications, Manage Service Applications.
2.	Click New and choose the action Search Service Application.
3.	Type the name of your Search Service Application (for example, FAST Query SSA).
4.	Choose the type of the Search Service Application for FAST Search Query.
5.	Set the Application Pool for the Search Admin Web Service or create a new one.
6.	Set the Application Pool for the Search Query and Site Settings Web Service or create a new one.
7.	Provide the Query Service Location. The requested value can be found in the install_info.txt (for example, http://fastsearch.companyabc.com:13287 or https://fastsearch.companyabc.com:13286).
8.	Provide the Administration Service Location, found in the install_info.txt (for example, http://fastsearch.companyabc.com:13257 or https://fastsearch.companyabc.com:13258).
9.	Set the resource store location, also found in the install_info.txt (for example, http://fastsearch.companyabc.com:13255).
10.	Finally, enter the account for administration service (for example, companyabc\fastuser).
11.	Click OK and save your changes.

With these steps, your FAST Search Server is ready to be used in SharePoint 2010. The only thing you have to do is associate the FAST Query Service with your web applications; then create the FAST Search Centers as previously described.