For organizations that rely on managing content through localized or departmentalized SharePoint farms or organizations that have millions of documents, it may be necessary (or desirable) to configure and deploy farms that are only responsible for handling search functions. In Chapter 2, Planning a SharePoint Farm, and Chapter 3, Managing and Maintaining a SharePoint Farm, we discussed basic MinRole farm architectures. In some enterprise scenarios, though, it may be necessary to dedicate multiple servers to processing and servicing search requests for your organization.
For these scenarios, you can start with the pre-built scenarios that Microsoft provides:
| Volume of content (SharePoint 2013) | Volume of content (SharePoint 2016) | Sample Search architecture |
| Up to 10 million items | Up to 20 million items | Small search farm |
| Up to 40 million items | Up to 80 million items | Medium search farm |
| Up to 100 million items | Up to 200 million items | Large search farm |
| Not... |
