Actually, you don't technically _need_ a load balancer, you could hard code all requests to the same node and internally, everything would "just work". But then you'd be _creating_ a single point of failure if that node went down, so a fronting LB is usually indicated.
Perhaps the thing you're missing is that Zookeeper is there explicitly for the purpose of knowing where all the nodes are and what their state is. Solr communicates with ZK and any incoming requests (update or query) are handled appripriately thus Jason's comment that once a request gets to any node in the cluster, things are handled automatically. All that said, if you're using SolrJ and use CloudSolrServer exclusively, then the load balancer isn't necessary. Internally CloudSolrServer (the client) reads the list of accessible nodes from Zookeeper and will be fault tolerant and load balance internally. Best Erick On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 3:51 PM, Jason Hellman <jhell...@innoventsolutions.com> wrote: > Jamey, > > You will need a load balancer on the front end to direct traffic into one of > your SolrCore entry points. It doesn't matter, technically, which one though > you will find benefits to narrowing traffic to fewer (for purposes of better > cache management). > > Internally SolrCloud will round-robin distribute requests to other shards > once a query begins execution. But you do need an entry point externally to > be defined through your load balancer. > > Hope this is useful! > > Jason > > On May 30, 2013, at 12:48 PM, James Dulin <jdu...@crelate.com> wrote: > >> Working to setup SolrCloud in Windows Azure. I have read over the solr >> Cloud wiki, but am a little confused about some of the deployment options. >> I am attaching an image for what I am thinking we want to do. 2 VM’s that >> will have 2 shards spanning across them. 4 Nodes total across the two >> machines, and a zookeeper on each VM. I think this is feasible, but, I am a >> little confused about how each node knows how to respond to requests (do I >> need a load balancer in front, or can we just reference the “collection” >> etc.) >> >> >> >> Thanks! >> >> Jamey >> >> >
