A mechanism for automatically laying out a search topology and assisting administration of the system in a shared services environment is provided. A search configuration wizard user interface may prompt an administrator to specify a number of items to be supported by the search system on initial search application topology configuration, as well as selections between high-availability or high throughput options. A topology manager managing the search configuration wizard may determine how many servers are needed upon receiving configuration options and create specific search components on available servers to optimize query and crawl performance for the system.