Search Services Upgrade Paths

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Search Services Upgrade Paths

tpage
Alfresco Employee
3 3 8,173

Recently the team were asked about potential upgrade paths from Solr 4 to different versions of Search Services. This page aims to look specifically at upgrading and reindexing across various versions of our search products. Some noteworthy upgrade paths are shown in this diagram:

Some potential upgrade paths showing versions of ACS and where reindexes are required.Some potential upgrade paths showing versions of ACS and where reindexes are required.

All Search Services versions are based on Solr 6 (at time of writing), and so an existing Solr 4 index cannot be reused. If an ACS upgrade is required then this must be done before the reindexing can start (because populating e.g. Search Services 2.0.x is not supported with ACS 5.x).

It is possible to upgrade from Search Services 1.3.x to Search Services 1.4.3.3 without a reindex - they are both based on Solr 6 and the index structure has not changed significantly. However there are some performance improvements in 1.4.3.3 which will not be seen without a reindex (or they will only effect new documents).

Many versions of Search Services and Insight Engine are not shown in the diagram. However the other versions are broadly similar to those shown:

  • Search Services 1.0.x-1.2.x and Insight Engine 1.0.x-1.1.x act similarly to Search Services 1.3.x;

  • Search Services and Insight Engine 1.4.0-1.4.3.2 act similarly to Search Services 1.4.3.3, but do not contain important performance fixes.

A large compatibility matrix is given at the end of the post.

Further Reading

In a large system (e.g. tens of millions of documents) then the reindexing process can take many days. This will usually not be acceptable downtime for search and so it's important to reindex in parallel using a separate system from the production system.  More information about this and other related topics can be found in the Tech Talk Live presentation “(Re)Indexing Large Repositories in Alfresco”:

https://www.alfresco.com/events/webinars/tech-talk-live-reindexing-large-repositories

If you're interested in upgrading to Search Services or Insight Engine 2.0 specifically, then the Tech Talk Live "Discovering the '2' in Search Services 2.0" contains further information about why reindexing is necessary when upgrading to 2.0.

https://www.alfresco.com/events/webinars/tech-talk-live-123-discovering-search-services-2

Finally Angel Borroy’s Dev Con 2019 presentation “Upgrading to Alfresco 6“ is likely to be useful for customers upgrading from 5.x to 6.x:

https://www.slideshare.net/angelborroy/2019-dev-con115angelborroy

Compatibility Matrix

The official docs site contains information about which versions of ACS are compatible with each version of search, but this information is spread across several pages. Here we show the same information in a more concise table:

+--------------+--------+--------+--------+--------+----------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+
| ACS \ Search | Solr 4 | SS 1.0 | SS 1.1 | SS 1.2 |  SS 1.3  | SS 1.4 | SS 2.0 | IE 1.0 | IE 1.1 | IE 1.4 | IE 2.0 |
+--------------+--------+--------+--------+--------+----------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+
| ACS 6.2      |        |        |        |        |          |   ✓    |   ✓    |        |        |   ✓    |   ✓    |
| ACS 6.1      |        |        |        |        | 1.3.0.5+ |   ✓    |        |   ✓    |   ✓    |   ✓    |        |
| ACS 6.0      |        |        |   ✓    |   ✓    | 1.3.0.5+ |   ✓    |        |   ✓    |   ✓    |   ✓    |        |
| ACS 5.2      |   ✓    |   ✓    |   ✓    |   ✓    |    ✓     |        |        |        |        |        |        |
| ACS 5.1      |   ✓    |        |        |        |          |        |        |        |        |        |        |
| ACS 5.0      |   ✓    |        |        |        |          |        |        |        |        |        |        |
+--------------+--------+--------+--------+--------+----------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+

Note that ACS 6.0 and ACS 6.1 are not compatible with Search Services before 1.3.0.5.

About the Author
Angel Borroy is Hyland Developer Evangelist. Over the last 15 years, he has been working as a software architect on Java, BPM, document management and electronic signatures. He has been working with Alfresco during the last years to customize several implementations in large organizations and to provide add-ons to the Community based on Record Management and Electronic Signature. He writes (sometimes) on his personal blog http://angelborroy.wordpress.com. He is (proud) member of the Order of the Bee.
3 Comments
Stroman221
Member II
Alfresco Content Services upgrade paths · Upgrades from Alfresco Content Services 5.2 must first upgrade from Solr 4 to Search Services, and then upgrade to 6.2.
pauldavidmena
Customer

I have inherited an Alfresco website running version 4.2.6.4. What would be the recommended migration path to bring the instance current?

angelborroy
Alfresco Employee