Multiple User Profile Applications and People Crawl
Man it’s been a while since I posted.
Recently I had a requirement to have more than one UPA in an Enterprise-wide SharePoint Environment. I ran into a snag with crawling People from both the UPAs and this is blog post explains how I got around it. If you have more than one UPA, by default, your people content source will only fetch people profiles from the default UPA.
The UPAs in my architecture reside on a resource farm with other Cross Farm Services such as Managed Metadata Service, Web Analytics, etc. Furthermore, I have two Application Servers in the Resource Farm and I have a separate instance of the User Profile Service running on either application servers since the UPS and UPA have a 1-to-1 relationship, i.e. only one UPA can be hosted on a single UPS instance.
In summary I have:
Application Server 1 à Hosts User Profile Service 1 à Hosts User Profile Application 1 (UPA1)
Application Server 2 à Hosts User Profile Service 2 à Hosts User Profile Application 2 (UPA2)
In my case UPA1 is crawling specific OUs in Active Directory and UPA2 is crawling another set of OUs. Each UPA has its own set of profile, sync and social databases in SQL Server.
My Content Farms hosts Search and the Content Source for People. First time I ran the crawl on the people content source it only crawled people profiles from UPA1, but the people profiles from UPA2 were not crawled. The My Site host on both the UPAs was identical.
SOLUTION:
Long story short what I found out was that UPA2 needed its own dedicated shadow (dummy) web application with a site collection host. Then this had to be added to the people content source as the second target endpoint for crawling. I ran the People Content source crawl again on the content farm and now I was able to see people from both the UPAs.
