Replicating WebSphere Commerce Search with the repeater

The repeater is set up after all the search clusters in both Staging environment and Production environment are already configured.

Procedure

  1. In the Production environment, set up the repeater:
    1. Complete the following task: Federating and clustering the WebSphere Commerce Search server in the advanced configuration. Any cluster member in the search cluster can be used as the repeater.
    2. Copy all files from the solrhome in the Production System over to a separate file system location accessible by the repeater.
      For example, MC_file_names and solr.xml. This is the new solrhome of the repeater.
    3. From the new solrhome of the repeater, modify each one of the repeater's solrconfig.xml to reconfigure for the search repeater (uncomment section 2). Then, set the master URL to point to its corresponding Solr core in the master Solr server from the Staging environment.
  2. In the production environment, set up all the subordinate search servers to point to the repeater:
    1. For each of the subordinate search servers in production, modify each of their solrconfig.xml files to enable the predefined section 1. The section is designed for use with subordinate search servers in production.
    2. Update the master URL in the solrconfig.xml file to point to the corresponding Solr core in the repeater.
    3. Update the SRCHCONF table to point to the host name of the repeater. Preprocessing for emergency fixes is now applied in the production system and reindexing through the repeater.
  3. If index builds are needed in the production environment, such as making emergency fixes with Quick Publish:
    1. In the search repeater server WebSphere Application Server administrative console, update the WebSphere Commerce Search data source to point to the production server database.
    2. In the production server database, update the SRCHCONF and SRCHCONFEXT tables by setting the SearchServerName value in the CONFIG column to the search repeater web server host name.
      Note: Emergency updates that are applied on production must be duplicated on staging.
  4. For each of the master search servers in Staging, modify the solrconfig.xml to enable the predefined section 3 in the solrconfig.xml file.
    Note: In the next topic, the configSearchReplication utility helps automate this step by configuring the utility to update the solrconfig.xml file in multiple locations.