Installing a Microsoft Search Server 2010 Farm Part I

This is how the Standalone install compares with the Server Farm install

	Standalone	Server Farm
Configuration options during installation	None. Stand-alone installation is automated with default settings and proceeds without prompts.	·        Requires that you specify an existing SQL Server host computer and an empty database. ·        At the end of the installation, you can run the Initial Farm Configuration Wizard to configure certain initial farm settings.
Purpose and scalability	Enables you to deploy a fully functional Search Server configuration on one computer. The computer functions as an application server for crawling and serving queries, a Web server for serving search queries and rendering search results, and a database server for hosting all of the necessary search databases. After a stand-alone installation, there is no option to add computers to the deployment to create a multiple-server farm. This configuration can be useful when you want any of the following: ·        A small-scale deployment that has minimal administrative overhead ·        A development or test environment ·        A deployment for product evaluation	Enables you to deploy a fully functional Search Server deployment on one computer initially, and then add multiple application servers and Web servers to the deployment to distribute the search functionality and workload. We recommend using the Server Farm installation option when you are creating a production farm because this deployment can be scaled out to multiple crawl servers, query servers, and Web servers.
Database	Microsoft  SQL Server 2008 Express is installed automatically.	Requires a SQL Server host computer. The SQL Server host computer can be a different computer from the Search Server host computer.
Indexing capability	Microsoft  SQL Server 2008 Express limits maximum database size to 4 gigabytes (GB). In a stand-alone installation, this limits Search Server indexing capability to approximately 300,000 items, depending on the size and type of the items.	With a SQL Server host computer that meets the version requirements specified in the Software requirements section in Hardware and software requirements (Search Server 2010), Search Server provides sub-second query response times for an index of up to 100 million items, depending on the size and type of the items.

For my lab build I start off by installing SQL on my test server.  I will be building my whole farm on a single server and then add additional servers as I expand.   This is because traditionally it is not possible to grow a SharePoint environment that was installed as a standalone.