Google Search Appliance Upgrade and Migration Handbook - Manual (Page 10)

Indexing considerations
When upgrading a search appliance that uses connectors or feeds to index documents, theconnector or
feeds must be stopped or paused for the duration of the update process, as the GSA will not process feeds
during the course of an upgrade.
Serving considerations
When connectors are used for authentication and/or authorization, and serving is switched to a mirrored or
hot backup search appliance during the upgrade of a master GSA, the connector will need to be configured
to respond to authentication/authorization requests from the alternative GSA. This can be achieved by
following the instructions in “
Configuring Connectors with GSA Mirroring .”
Executing a GSA upgrade
The following steps outline the final preparations recommended prior to executing a version upgrade to the
GSA:
Become familiar with the Update Instructions
The Update Instructions for the targeted release version contain critical information related to executing the
upgrade, and may include special considerations that apply to certain deployment environments. For
example:
● If Mirroring, Distributed Crawling and Serve, or Unification are in use, the Update Instructions for
each version will contain specific steps to be followed
● If Policy ACLs or Dynamic Navigation are in use, the Update Instructions may have special
considerations for these features.
Determine whether to rebuild or migrate the search index
Most version upgrades will provide the option either to migrate the existing search index to the new version,
or wipe the index and force a re­crawl of all content (feeds and connectors will also need to resend all
content). In most cases, migrating the index is the most effective means to perform an update.
Situations where rebuilding the index would be appropriate include:
● When re­indexing is required to take advantage of new features. For example, using Document
Previews in v7.0 requires content to be re­indexed.
● When updating a Replica search appliance in a mirrored GSA network, the index of the Replica
GSA should not be migrated and will need to be synchronized from the Master GSA once the
update is complete.
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