I am looking to implement a "failover" scenario where my production Splunk environment (indexes, .conf, searches, etc) gets replicated on my backup server dynamically. Would a deployment server best fit here?
Not really, because the deployment server only handles apps. It is no general replication mechanism.
This docs section covers failover and other high availability techniques pretty well: http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/Installation/Highavailabilityreferencearchitectur...
