I'll answer the easy one:
#4 - yes! In fact, it would seem wise in many of these straightforward cases
like yours to leave standard master/slave as-is for the time being even when
upgrading to Solr 4. No need to make life more complicated. Now, if you did
want to have NRT where updates are pushed to the replicas as they come in, then
that's when the SolrCloud capabilities will come into play.
But, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Erik
On Sep 20, 2012, at 14:51 , Petersen, Robert wrote:
> Hello solr user group,
>
> I am evaluating the new Solr 4.0 beta with an eye to how to fit it into our
> current solr setup. Our current setup is running on solr 3.6.1 and uses 12
> slaves behind a load balancer and a master which we index into, and they all
> have three cores (now referred to as collections in 4.0 eh?) for three
> disparate types of indexes. All machines are configured with dual quad xeon
> cpus and 64GB main memory. We've worked hard to keep our index sizes small
> despite holding millions of documents, so we have no need to shard any of the
> indexes. Everything is working very well at this time.
>
> So to move to solr 4.0, I imagine we'd set -DnumShards=1 and spin up 11
> replicas, but I'm worried about the statement "For production, it's
> recommended that you run an external zookeeper ensemble rather than having
> Solr run embedded zookeeper servers." That means we'd need at least three
> more machines dedicated to just running zookeeper. So here are my questions:
>
>
> 1. Could the zookeeper servers be smaller commodity servers? Ie They
> wouldn't need 64GB of memory and huge CPUs right?
>
> 2. Is the overhead of running embedded zookeeper really great enough to
> require the external ensemble? Our configuration will be pretty static, I
> don't anticipate having to change the zookeeper cluster once it is set up
> unless a machine completely dies or something.
>
> 3. Can we still use our external load balancer hardware to distribute
> queries to the solr 4.0 replicas as we do now with our slave farm?
>
> 4. Can solr 4.0 still run in a master- slave configuration if we don't
> want to use zookeeper or some of the other cloud features?
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Robert (Robi) Petersen
> Senior Software Engineer
> Site Search Specialist
>
>
