How to make the secondary search index replica server to primary in SharePoint 2013?

Question

Hi,

I have a SharePoint 2013 farm with two search index servers (yes SharePoint 2013 in this cloud era! :)). Both the servers had the search replica setup with single partition. One of them was primary index replica server. Somehow the primary index replica server got some issues and therefore SharePoint made the secondary one as primary automatically due to the fault tolerance. Now, I'm in the process of removing the faulty index server and adding a new server. I have done that (i.e. added a new server in the farm). I've not done anything about the search related setup on that new server yet. My goal is to setup the search index replica on the new server and make it the primary index replica and then remove the faulty index server from the farm.

My question is - can we make a secondary index replica server to primary? I'm following this article https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/search/manage-the-index-component and I couldn't find such parameter to make the secondary index replica to primary? Is the only way to re-setup the whole search service application?

Let me know if someone has any idea about it.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Hi @Ashish Gupta ,

Per my research, The Primary replica is contacted by the content processing component to write new items to an Index partition. And the secondary replicas are more like read-only copies of the same data. So i would not suggest you make the secondary search index replica server to primary. I'm afraid that you have to re-setup it.

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