Installation

Hardware

Since CLAIMS Direct SOLR is a pre-configured, bundled distribution of Apache SOLR, it can be deployed on any number of nodes (individual instances). This documentation describes installation and configuration on a single node without the use of SolrCloud.

There are many scenarios for a CLAIMS Direct deployment that range from indexing the entire content of CLAIMS Direct XML to the sparse indexing of certain fields and ranges of publication dates for application-specific usage. There could also be specific QoS requirements: minimum supported queries per second, average response time, etc. All of these factors play a role in planning for a CLAIMS Direct SOLR deployment. Generally speaking, a stand-alone full index with the entire content of CLAIMS Direct XML requires, at a minimum, the following:

Requirement	Minimum	Recommended
CPU	16-cores	32-cores
System Memory	128GB	256GB
Storage	Basic: 6TB (SSD) Premium: 8TB (SSD) Premium+: 8TB (SSD)

The minimum required storage allows for a full index and approximately 1-2 years of growth. It doesn't allow space for SOLR optimization (see "Commit and Optimize Operations" in Uploading Data with Index Handlers) unless carefully planned. Please contact support@ificlaims.com for more information about optimization with minimum requirements.

Currently, the delivery of a fully populated CLAIMS Direct index requires the above SOLR hardware requirements. A customized deployment with select data to index is currently not offered fully populated. With a custom configuration, hardware requirements are dependent on use case and complete indexing will need to be done at the installation site.

Software

The CLAIMS Direct SOLR installation is a self-contained package suitable for deployment on any Linux server running Java 8. The simple prerequisite tool list follows:

Name	Used By
java	ZooKeeper, SOLR and various support tools
wget	Configuration tools (bootstrap-*.sh)
lsof	Start/stop scripts (solrctl/zookeeperctl)

Create User asolr

It is recommended to create the user asolr.

useradd -m asolr
passwd asolr
  => <passwd>

Configuring Standalone SOLR

CLAIMS Direct SOLR uses the Apache SOLR distribution for indexing. The fully-populated delivery of the index is a single-node collection as described above. The collection name is alexandria and although it is configurable, we recommended not changing this setting.

Configuration

Note

Your IP address allocation may be different. These are configurable in solr-alexandria-vars.

The following variables should be configured in solr-alexandria-vars

Variable	Value	Description
`ALEXANDRIA_SOLR_PORT`	8080	The port SOLR (Jetty) should listen on and accept requests.
`ALEXANDRIA_SOLR_URL`	10.234.1.91	The URL to configure collections. The IP address should be the local address of the server.
`ALEXANDRIA_SOLR_JVM_MEM`	96g	This is the java heap setting. Generally speaking, you should allocate at least 64g. The exact amount should be approximately 80% of total memory.

Deployment

Download package

cd /home/asolr
wget http://alexandria.fairviewresearch.com/software/alexandria-solr-v2.1.2-standalone-distribution.tar.gz &
tar zxvf alexandria-solr-v2.1.2-standalone-distribution.tar.gz
cd /home/asolr/alexandria-solr-v2.1.2-standalone-distribution

Adjust `solr-alexandria-vars`

The following variables need to be confirmed or set:

Variable	Value
`ALEXANDRIA_SOLR_URL`	http://10.234.1.91:$ALEXANDRIA_SOLR_PORT/$ALEXANDRIA_SOLR_CONTEXT
`ALEXANDRIA_SOLR_JVM_MEM`	64g

Starting SOLR

 $ ./solrctl start
Initializing solr.xml ... done
Waiting up to 30 seconds to see Solr running on port 8080 [/]  
Started Solr server on port 8080 (pid=10520). Happy searching!

SOLR Interface

At this point, you can now visit http://10.234.1.91:8080/alexandria-v2.1/old.html

Stopping SOLR

./solrctl stop
( stop ) ...
# etc.

Next Steps

Once SOLR has been installed, set up the indexing daemon aidxd.

SOLR Installation Type 2