Presentation on how to move from the Alfresco Search Services product based in Apache Solr to the new Alfresco Search Enterprise integrated with Elasticsearch and Amazon Opensearch.

1. June 6 - 8th, 2023
Hyland’s Global Headquarters – Westlake, OH

2. How to migrate from Search Services
to Search Enterprise
THE ALFRESCO NEXT-GEN SEARCH SERVICE
Angel Borroy
Developer Evangelist

3. AGENDA
§ Meet the Alfresco Search Family!
§ Deploying Alfresco Search Enterprise
§ Migrating from Alfresco Search Services

4. MEET THE SEARCH FAMILY!

5. REPOSITORY
SEARCH SERVICES
SEARCH
ENGINE

6. Search and
Insight Engine
Search Services
SEARCH PRODUCTS
Search Enterprise Cloud
Connector
(+) Sharding
(+) Reporting
2.x
3.x
STANDARD
COMMUNITY
Search Services
ENTERPRISE
Search and Insight Engine
Search Enterprise

7. SEARCH SERVICES + SEARCH AND INSIGHT ENGINE
Content Services
Search Services
HTTP
HTTP alfresco.cron=0/10 * * * * ? *
Transform Core
AIO
HTTP
Asynchronous polling request indexing mode

8. SEARCH ENTERPRISE
Content Services
Search Enterprise
Database
PostgreSQL
Messages
ActiveMQ
TCP
TCP
JDBC
HTTP
HTTP
Transform Service
JDBC
TCP
HTTP
Asynchronous message indexing mode
Cloud Connector

9. DEPLOYING SEARCH
ENTERPRISE

10. SIMPLE DEPLOYMENT : SEARCH & INDEXING
alfresco/alfresco-content-repository
alfresco/alfresco-activemq alfresco/alfresco-elasticsearch-live-indexing
alfresco/alfresco-transform-router
alfresco/alfresco-shared-file-store
Local deployment is supported via
java -jar alfresco-elasticsearch-live-indexing.jar

11. SIMPLE DEPLOYMENT : REINDEXING
alfresco/alfresco-content-repository
alfresco/alfresco-activemq
alfresco/alfresco-transform-router
alfresco/alfresco-shared-file-store
alfresco/alfresco-elasticsearch-reindexing
Local deployment is supported via
java -jar alfresco-elasticsearch-reindexing.jar
Metadata
Permissions
Paths
Content

12. metadata
metadata
SCALING UP : INDEXING
CLUSTER
mediation
metadata
content path
alfresco/alfresco-elasticsearch-live-indexing
alfresco/alfresco-activemq
alfresco/alfresco-shared-file-store

13. SCALING UP : INDEXING
content NoC < 10
Increasing the number of consumers doesn’t help
Number of Pending Messages +++
metadata NoC++
Increase the number of metadata consumers
Search Engine Resources++
Increase RAM / CPU of Cluster
Alternatively, add a new node to the Cluser
(shards are managed internally)
mediation NoC++
Increase the number of mediation consumers

14. SCALING UP : SEARCHING
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/tune-for-search-speed.html
https://opensearch.org/docs/latest/search-plugins/knn/performance-tuning/#search-performance-tuning
§ Configure HEAP with ES_HEAP_SIZE
• Avoid using directly -Xms -Xmx
• Leave ½ of the memory available to Lucene
§ Reduce swapping
• Using bootstrap.mlockall:true property prevents JVM to swap
§ Set the right buffer size for indexing with
indices.memory.index_buffer_size
• Each Shard requires around 512 mb but increasing it doesn’t help

15. SCALING UP : REINDEXING WITH REMOTE PARTITIONS
alfresco-elasticsearch-reindexing
alfresco-elasticsearch-reindexing
alfresco-elasticsearch-reindexing
alfresco-activemq
MANAGER
DB Schema Validation
Partition creation
Reindexing
Database
WORKER 1
Read partition
Index nodes
WORKER N
Read partition
Index nodes
Alfresco
Database
Produce partition requests >
< Consume workers replies
…
< partition
< partition
reply >
reply >
Partition
By ID Range
By Date Range

16. SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS
Search Enterprise
ActiveMQ
Transform Service
mTLS
mTLS
mTLS
mTLS
Content Services
mTLS
https://github.com/alfresco/alfresco-ssl-generator
truststore
keystore
truststore
keystore
truststore
keystore
truststore keystore
truststore
keystore

17. MIGRATING FROM SEARCH
SERVICES

18. WHY TO ADOPT SEARCH ENTERPRISE
§ Supporting Elasticsearch and OpenSearch out-of-the-box products
§ Documents and values are available for searching sooner
§ Re-indexing large repositories is much faster, moving the scale of
time from days to hours
§ Scaling up the search engine is easier, and it can be almost
transparent when using managed services
§ Cloud deployment based in Kubernetes is better supported
§ Alfresco Search products based in SOLR are currently in
maintenance mode

19. DESIGNING YOUR PATH TO SEARCH ENTERPRISE
Upgraded
ACS
Compatibility
Existing
ACS
ACS >= 7.1
Upgrade
ACS
Rewrite
queries
Downtime
Parallel
Indexing
Unsupported Features Supported Platforms Zero Downtime Upgrade

20. COMPATIBILITY VERIFICATION
Review Unsupported Features documentation
§ Field Queries like DBID, TXID, ACLID, ANCESTOR or FTSSTATUS
§ SQL query language using JDBC Driver
§ Data types like any, assocref, locale and qname
Audit your ACS Deployment
§ Build a query catalog for your use case
§ Approach using the Audit Subsystem is available in
• https://github.com/AlfrescoLabs/alfresco-query-catalog-builder
Run a dry run on a testing environment using Search Enterprise with
your data and your apps

21. UPGRADING FROM ACS 6.X
ACS 6.x
SOLR
ACS 7.4
Elasticsearch | OpenSearch
ACS 7.4
Elasticsearch | OpenSearch Elasticsearch | OpenSearch
Replica DB
ACS 7.4
Reindexing Reindexing Indexing
Content Store
https://docs.alfresco.com/search-enterprise/latest/upgrade/#upgrade-from-legacy-content-services

22. ZERO DOWNTIME UPGRADE
ACS 7.4
SOLR
ACS 7.4
Elasticsearch | OpenSearch Elasticsearch | OpenSearch
Replica DB
ACS 7.4
Reindexing + Indexing Indexing
Content Store
https://docs.alfresco.com/search-enterprise/latest/upgrade/#zero-downtime-upgrade

23. UPGRADE TO SEARCH ENTERPRISE TODAY!

24. Thank you!