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Azure VM file indexing question

  • 19 April 2021
  • 3 replies
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I have a question regarding the File Indexing for Advanced reporting and search in Command Center. It’s not 100% clear for me after reading docs online.

Let’s assume I enable indexing on one VM group. I understand that the MA associated with the storage policy used to backup this VM group will automatically have some roles installed and become index server.

Now let’s assume I enable indexing on a different VM group where I use a different MA for backup. What will be the behaviour:

  1. Will a second, separate index instance be created? I will have two separate MA index servers and two separate indexes?
  2. Will I have a second indexing “node”, but the index will be shared between MA1 and MA2?
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Best answer by Neha Jain 19 April 2021, 16:49

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Userlevel 7
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Hi @Marcin.Dziewanowski 

Thanks for the question and welcome to the Community!

Checking Documentation - File Indexing for Virtual Machines - Requirements, we have this statement:

When you enable file indexing on a VM group, the system will push the packages to the MediaAgent that is specified in the associated backup plan or storage policy. That MediaAgent then begins acting like an index server.

It is recommended that you deploy a separate MediaAgent, rather than using a shared computer, for the index server. Make sure that you associate this MediaAgent with the storage plan policy.

 

This suggests that if the MA defined in the plan or storage policy for your second VM group is a different MA, then another new, different Index instance will be created.

I’ll double check this with our Virtualization team internally for 100% confirmation.

Thanks,

Stuart

Userlevel 2
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Hi Marcin.

Thanks for the question. As Stuart mentioned correctly, two different Index Servers will get created.
Regarding your second question, both the index server are independent and will not share the index between MA1 and MA2.

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Thanks very much @Stuart Painter  and @Neha Jain , this answers my question 100%.

Reason I asked is because I use dedicated MA per Azure subscription and I didn’t want index to be shared with MA in different subscriptions. Now I know that each MA will have it’s own separate index, which is what we want :)

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