Quick post…
I had an issue creating the Search Service Application in SharePoint 2013 – my environment is running the baseline 2012 March CU.
The error I was seeing was:
Unable to retrieve topology component health states. This may be because the admin component is not up and running.
I’m sure there are many reasons for seeing this error, I checked all the usual suspects around permissions, firewall etc.
In my case, it was because I had modified the NodeRunner configuration file to prevent the amount of memory being utilised by this process.
This file can be found in the following location:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Search\Runtime\1.0\noderunner.exe.config
I changed the following in the config file:
<!– Settings enforced by the node runner itself. –>
<!– These settings can also be set using command line arguments with the same name. –>
<nodeRunnerSettings memoryLimitMegabytes=”500” />
As default, memoryLimitMegabytes is set to ‘0’ – unlimted…not so good on a below spec SharePoint DEV system.
My resolution was to restore the original value of ‘0’ – and to recreate the search service app – which worked perfectly.