Search Engine on Separate Host

The following illustration shows a multi-host installation where solr is running in a single, dedicated search host:

To do this you would need to:

• Install Tomcat on your search host.

• Deploy the solr and indexer web applications supplied with the Content Engine on the search host.

• Copy the solr configuration files supplied with the Content Engine to the search host, making sure to modify the index schema to meet your requirements, as described in Customizing the Index Schema.

• Modify your publication web applications to use the solr instance on your search host.

Isolating solr in this way would ensure that re-indexing, for example, does not adversely affect response times on your presentation hosts. However, it would also make the search host a single point of failure. A more robust solution would be to have two or more search hosts, and direct requests to them via a load balancing and/or fail-over service so that:

• Requests are evenly distributed between the search hosts

• If one host fails, requests are re-directed to other hosts

Load balancing/fail-over strategies can be implemented in many different ways using a variety of different standard products and technologies. Exactly how you do this is outside the scope of this manual: the point is that since all the components involved in searching and indexing communicate via standard, stateless HTTP requests, you can do it using standard web management techniques.