Google Search Appliance Deployment Governance and Operational Models - Manual (Page 19)

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Testing / QA environment (optional)
The Testing/QA environment is similar to the development environment, as it is a replicated, non-
production environment. This environment should be kept stable for any testers accessing the system.
Pushes for deployment components, configuration changes, or front end changes should be done in
phases according to a configuration management process. The testing team should be notified of any
changes to this environment that could impact their testing.
Because the GSA is a product that indexes and doesn’t modify sources of content, the GSA QA
environment can point to either QA or production sources of content, with different considerations for both
approaches.
Performance testing can be executed in this environment to develop a baseline, taking into account that
the production environment will still outsize this environment in terms of hardware specs.
Production environment
The production environment is a live user environment that should be sized according to requirements for
index size and performance.
Changes to the production environment should be introduced under a strict configuration management
process. All changes being migrated into production should be tested and signed off while in the QA
environment. Operational outages should be taken into account when migrating into production. Any
changes should be made at an optimal time, with the least amount of business impact.
Production backup / disaster recovery environment
In most cases, particularly where search is a business critical application for users, it is important to have
a backup/disaster recovery environment as part of the production environment. A backup/disaster
recovery environment replicates the production environment and can be used for situations of planned or
unplanned outages. This environment will typically be an exact copy of the production environment, with
similar infrastructure and capacity.
Production environment capacity planning considerations
Replicated production environments are not always used just for backup/disaster recovery capabilities;
they can also be used for capacity planning. If one GSA cannot handle all the serve-time search load
coming to it, a GSA replica can be used in a load balanced configuration for capacity planning purposes.
That way, the serving load will be distributed between multiple GSAs serving the same content.
It is important to note that due to the mirroring feature of the GSA, only one GSA will normally acquire
new content, while
pushing and syncing changes to replica GSAs in the configuration.