Sorry if this has been asked before but I can't find the answer anywhere.
Previously when we have installed Service Applications in SharePoint 2010 farm we have the ability to assign which server it runs on during the autospinstaller scripts, or manually stopping services on the web front ends and only run them on the application servers.
My question relates to the FAST Content and Query service applications.
Basically they seem to get installed on the FARM but don't appear to be running on a particular server as such, as they are noticeably absent from the services on FARM screen in central admin. Can someone explain exactly where they run and what will happen if we lost a application server that it appears to be running on ?
I always thought it just runs in the farm and you create content sources and ensure that the content sources is accessible on the server you are on, can someone clarify this please?
We currently have 2 application servers, 1 database , 2 fast servers, 3 web front ends, have setup a content source for the FAST 2010 content service and just hostfiled the URL for the first application server. When the crawls start up the application server cpu spikes but the other one is not being used presumably because its not feeding any traffic to that server because of the hostfile to just the first application server.
Thanks
nightmarer