Google Search Appliance Upgrade and Migration Handbook User Manual
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Migrating with a distributed GSA architecture
In both Distributed Crawl and Serve, as well as Unification architectures, GSA Mirroring can be used to
expedite migration from one set of appliances to a new set of hardware (eg. in renewal), per one of the above
methods. In this scenario, it is critical that the node assignment and configuration remains the same for
each appliance in the target architecture.
For example, when renewing hardware in a three shard architecture in Distributed Crawl and Serve, shards
A, B and C will have temporary mirrors of A2, B2 and C2 (ie. the new hardware). When this new hardware is
configured with Distributed Crawl and Serve, they must be assigned the same shards (A2 must be master,
B2 should be the second shard, and C2 should be the third shard).
This is however, more complex and an advanced migration option than most GSA environments require,
and it is generally recommended that migration by reconfiguration and reindexing be performed when
migrating a distributed GSA architecture.
For details on configuring mirroring in distributed GSA architectures, refer to documentation on
and
.
Replacing a failed search appliance
Another common scenario for migrating a search appliance is when a GSA has encountered a hardware
failure and needs to be replaced. Migration from a backup or disaster recovery search appliance needs to
occur once a replacement GSA is received, and can be done by any of the above mentioned approaches.
Some additional considerations when replacing a failed search appliance include:
●
In cases where a failed appliance was part of a mirroring network (eg. a master appliance), a master
appliance must be reestablished first. For example, one of the replicas must be promoted to be a
master appliance, which then can be mirrored to the replacement appliance.
●
The appropriate GSA licensing must be applied to the main production serving appliance(s). If a
GSA with a production license was the one that failed, the replacement appliance must have a
production license to receive the appropriate level of support from Google Enterprise Support.
Moving a search appliance to another location
In some cases, it is required that a search appliance be moved to a new physical location. For example,
this may occur with changes to data centers.
Some considerations when physically moving a search appliance include:
●
System availability
Actions should be taken to assess and handle impacts of system downtime.
For example, stopping feeds and connectors, disabling GSA mirroring if configured, and switching
search serving to a failover GSA environment.
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