That is correct, the cloud does not currently elastically expand. Essentially when you first start up you define something like numShards, once numShards is reached all else goes in as replicas. If you manually specify the shards using the create core commands you can define the layout however you please, but that still doesn't change the fact that SolrCloud doesn't support elastically expanding after initially provisioning the cluster.
I've seen this on the roadmap before, but don't know where it falls on the current wish list, it's high on my mine :) On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 10:36 AM, Ranjan Bagchi <ranjan.bag...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > At this point I'm ok with one zk instance being a point of failure, I just > want to create sharded solr instances, bring them into the cluster, and be > able to shut them down without bringing down the whole cluster. > > According to the wiki page, I should be able to bring up new shard by using > shardId [-D shardId], but when I did that, the logs showed it replicating > an existing shard. > > Ranjan > Andre Bois-Crettez wrote: > >> You have to run ZK on a at least 3 different machines for fault >> tolerance (a ZK ensemble). >> >> http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrCloud#Example_C:_Two_shard_cluster_with_sha= >> rd_replicas_and_zookeeper_ensemble >> >> Ranjan Bagchi wrote: >> > Hi, >> > >> > I'm interested in setting up a solr cluster where each machine [at least >> > initially] hosts a separate shard of a big index [too big to sit on the >> > machine]. I'm able to put a cloud together by telling it that I have (to >> > start out with) 4 nodes, and then starting up nodes on 3 machines >> pointin= >> g >> > at the zkInstance. I'm able to load my sharded data onto each machine >> > individually and it seems to work. >> > >> > My concern is that it's not fault tolerant: if one of the non-zookeeper >> > machines falls over, the whole cluster won't work. Also, I can't create >> = >> a >> > shard with more data, and have it work within the existing cloud. >> > >> > I tried using -DshardId=3Dshard5 [on an existing 4-shard cluster], but it >> > just started replicating, which doesn't seem right. >> > >> > Are there ways around this? >> > >> > Thanks, >> > Ranjan Bagchi >> > >> >