FW: Scoping SolrCloud setup

-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Prentice [mailto:sp14@leximation.com]
Sent: 14 March 2018 05:32
To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org
Subject: Scoping SolrCloud setup

We're in the process of moving from 12 single-core collections (non-cloud
Solr) on 3 VMs to a SolrCloud setup. Our collections aren't huge, ranging in
size from 50K to 150K documents with one at 1.2M docs.
Our max query frequency is rather low .. probably no more than 10-20/min. We
do update frequently, maybe 10-100 documents every 10 mins.

Our prototype setup is using 3 VMs (4 core, 16GB RAM each), and we've got
each collection split into 2 shards with 3 replicas (one per VM).
Also, Zookeeper is running on each VM. I understand that it's best to have
each ZK server on a separate machine, but hoping this will work for now.

This all seemed like a good place to start, but after reading lots of
articles and posts, I'm thinking that maybe our smaller collections (under
100K docs) should just be one shard each, and maybe the 1.2M collection
should be more like 6 shards. How do you decide how many shards is right?

Also, our current live system is separated into dev/stage/prod tiers, not,
all of these tiers are together on each of the cloud VMs. This bothers some
people, thinking that it may make our production environment less stable. I
know that in an ideal world, we'd have them all on separate systems, but
with the replication, it seems like we're going to make the overall system
more stable. Is this a correct understanding?

I'm just wondering anyone has opinions on whether we're going in a
reasonable direction or not. Are there any articles that discuss these
initial sizing/scoping issues?

Thanks!
...scott