After a bit of testing on my lab server, I was able to reproduce the issue! We will not see a feature listed on the Features Page if the respective MSI file is missing from the Setup Media. Full-Text Search using the MSI called sql_fulltext.msi and is present in the setup path MediaRoot\x64\Setup. I was not able to see the sql_fulltext.msi file in the client’s setup media. I was suspecting other files to be missing too so we extracted a fresh copy of the setup media (from new downloaded ISO) and then ran the “New Failover Cluster” setup. This time, we were able to see Full-Text Search option. Let us learn how to fix the error related to unable to add node.
SQL SERVER – Full-Text Search Not Working For PDF Documents
Full-Text is a feature of SQL Server which allows linguistic search in various languages. In general, we use LIKE operator to search inside the column data, but it is not very efficient. There are multiple advantages of full-text search. You can read more about this on my blog Creating Full-Text Catalog and Full-Text Search