Google Search Appliance Configuring Distributed Crawling and Serving version 7.2 - Manual (Page 4)

Google Search Appliance: Configuring Distributed Crawling and Serving 4
Configuring Distributed Crawling
and Serving
This guide contains the information you need to use distributed crawling and serving, a feature of the
Google Search Appliance. Distributed crawling and serving, is a scalability feature in which several
search appliances are configured to behave as though they are a single search appliance. This greatly
increases the number of documents that can be crawled and served and greatly simplifies search
appliance administration. Use distributed crawling and serving when you need to index content
exceeding the license limits of an individual search appliance.
This document is for you if you are a search appliance administrator, network administrator, or another
person who configures search appliances or networks. You need to be familiar with the Google Search
Appliance and how to configure crawl, serve, and other features.
On the Admin Console, distributed crawling and serving is configured under Admin Console > GSA n .
Introduction to Distributed Crawling and Serving
Distributed crawling and serving is a Google Search Appliance features that expands the search
appliance’s capacity. Distributed crawling and serving is a scalability feature in which several search
appliances are configured to act as though they are a single search appliance, which greatly increases
the number of documents that can be crawled and served. After distributed crawling is enabled, all
crawling, indexing, and serving are configured on one search appliance, called the admin master.
For example, if you have four search appliances that are each licensed to crawl 10 million documents,
the search appliances can crawl a total of 40 million documents after you create a distributed crawling
configuration that includes all four search appliances.
In this release, you can serve from the master and nonmaster nodes.
After distributed crawling and serving is configured, the indexes on all search appliances are balanced to
distribute the documents evenly among the search appliances.
All search appliances in distributed crawling configurations must be the same search appliance model;
for example, all must be model GB-7007 or all must be model G500. You cannot have a GB-7007 and a
G500 in the same distributed crawling and serving configuration.
All search appliances must be on the same software version as well. For example, you cannot have one
search appliance in the configuration on version 6.8 and another on version 7.0. When you update from
one software version to the next, ensure that you update all search appliances in the configuration.
All search appliances must be in the same data center. Distributed crawling requires high bandwidth
between the search appliances, and works best when latency is low.