>>> Also, another issue that needs to be raised is the creation of cores from >>> the "core admin" section of the gui, doesnt really work well, it creates >>> files but then they do not work (again i am using 4.4)
>From my experience "core admin" section of the GUI does not work well in SolrCloud domain. If I am not mistaken this was somehow fixed in 4.5.0 which acts much better. I would use only HTTP requests ("cores and collections API") with SolrCloud and would use GUI only for viewing the state of cluster and cores. Primoz