Sharepoint 2010 Publishing and Consuming Cross-Farm Services

In my previous post I discussed about how to set trust relationship between Sharepoint farms and in relation with that article I will discuss on this article about how to publish and consume cross-farm services. Cross-farm services in Sharepoint 2010 is the ability to publish and consume services that is running from different Sharepoint farms for example you can publish a search service or profile service and let other Sharepoint farm to subscribe to this service.

Setup Publishing Search Service

• Log on to Central Administration and under Application Management click Manage services application.
• On Service Applications page click on Search Service Application then click on Publish button located on the top of the page.
  
  
• Input the necessary information from the popup window when Publish button was clicked. Copy Published URL and save it somewhere else this will be useful when configuring consumer farm. Click OK button to continue. You need to set the trust relationship with another farm follow steps on my previous post.
  
  
• Add Search permission, by searching the consuming farm id. To get the consuming farm id log in to consuming farm and open Sharepoint 2010 Management Shell from Start > All Programs > Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 Products. Execute Get-SPFarm | Select Id as shown below.
  
  
• Add the consuming farm id to have full control access permission. Click OK to continue.
  
  

Setup Consuming Farm

• Log on to Consuming Farm, go to Central Administration > Application Management > Manage services applications
• Click Connect > Search Service Proxy and type the Publishing URL and click OK and wait while it connects to proxy service.
  
  
• Click Search Service Application and click OK. Enter the Connection Name of the service and click OK. Wait while it finalize the connection and click OK once its done.
  
• Set the new search service proxy as a default search to a web application to do this go to Central Administration >  Application Management > Web Applications and select the appropriate web application and click Service Connections on the ribbon. Click OK when done.
  
  
• Create Enterprise Search and then try to search something that should exists in the other farm and If everything was configured as expected you should get a search result.

Additional reading http://www.kowalski.ms/2010/07/16/sharepoint-server-2010-enterprise-service-application-publishing-and-consuming-farms/.