More than once I’ve had this happen. For one reason or another, a change to the SharePoint Search Topology needed to be made.
Go in, add a new crawler or partition index, click save, and the page gets stuck on
Processing….
Please wait while your changes are processed for SharePoint Server Search.
Okay, one thing I’ve found to help avoid this issue. Make sure the SharePoint Admin service is running on each box in the farm BEFORE making any updates to the search topo.
Fix:
Navigate to timer job definitions.
http://YourCentralAdminSite/_admin/ServiceJobDefinitions.aspx
Change the View to Service
then change
Service: SharePoint Server Search
Run the Configuring the existing search service application SharePoint Server Search job.
Go back and check the modify topology page.
Remember, make sure the Admin Service is running!
*NOTE*
In the comments, user SM pointed out that the Configuring the existing search…. job may not appear unless it needs to be executed.
For some reason I can’t locate a job called “Configuring the existing search service application SharePoint Server Search” anywhere. Are you sure that’s what’s it is called. Is this advice for SharePoint 2010 or SharePoint 2013?
Alex, this is for SP2010 Enterprise.
I’ll look at the post again today and let you know what I find.
Alex,
Not sure how I found that Job and I’m not able to find it again.
If / when I find it, i’ll update this post.
You’re right – it is in that Job Definitions location as described in the post.
It was not showing on my production environment, however it was there on pre-production.
I wonder if it will only show up if there’s a particular error that it could deal with (I find this quite difficult to believe).
In fact – I have now fixed the issue on my pre-production environment and the “Configuring the existing search service application SharePoint Server Search” has disappeared. So it could very well be only showing up when it needs to be run.
@ SM, thanks for the info!
This isn’t working for me. I click on the “Configuring the existing search service application Search Service Application.” in Job Definitions, tell it to run now and it doesn’t do anything.
I was able to fix this by cycling the Admin and Timer services on the server you are moving the search service FROM.