Google Search Appliance Upgrade and Migration Handbook - Manual (Page 17)

● Replacing a failed production search appliance
● Moving a search appliance to another location
Renewing search appliances
The most common scenario for migrating a GSA is during the renewal of a GSA license. Since new and
more powerful hardware is provided with each renewal, migration planning is a critical component of the
renewal process.
With every renewal of appliances, a decision must be made on how to migrate from existing to new
appliances. The following table outlines the advantages and disadvantages of each migration method, where
new appliances are of a different version to existing appliances.
Advantages Disadvantages
Migrating index and
configurations ­ Ensures complete search index
replication
­ Does not require re­indexing of
content*
­ Mirroring index is faster than
re­crawling content ­ Requires upgrading existing
GSAs to same version as new
GSAs
­ Requires appropriate license
capacity**
­ More complex of a process,
particularly with distributed
architectures
Migrating configurations only ­ Allows control over what
content is indexed on new GSAs
­ Can be performed on GSAs
with differing versions
­ Minimal impact to existing GSA
configurations ­ Requires re­indexing of all
content (can be time intensive)
­ Creates additional load on
content servers during re­crawl
­ May require additional
connector and feed clients to be
configured
* Re­indexing of content may be required in some cases (eg. new features requiring re­index)
** Migrating index via mirroring can be performed if license is increased on new appliances, but not if
decreased
Promoting a GSA configuration from one environment to another
For migrating between environments (eg. test to production), a manual configuration approach is
recommended, since server names and URLs to crawl will usually vary. An export of similar configurations
(eg. front­end XSLT and collection definitions) should be performed, combined with manual entry of settings
in the admin console.
Increasing license count
In most cases where a GSA license limit is increased, the new license file can be applied to the existing
appliance, without any hardware migration being necessary. If a license is increased as part of a GSA
renewal however, certain considerations will need to be made, depending on the required changes to
deployment architecture.
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