Transition from Content Router to Replication Feeds

This FAQ will address the process to transition between the Content Router's (CR) replication mechanism and the Replication Feed mechanism inherent in Swarm.  
Previous to Swarm's replication feed mechanism, our solution to replicate data from one cluster to another automatically involved using the Content Router's replication mechanism.
The CR's replicator allows for flexible replication between clusters and involves running the CR software on independent servers (often co-resident on the CSN).  The Feeds mechanism is not quite as flexible as of Swarm 9.1 but allows an administrator to replicate one or more domains without using any additional servers.
Assuming you already have the Content Router replication in place, and desire to move to the Replication Feeds mechanism, these are the considerations.

  • You do not have to turn off the Content Routers or make any changes at all to the CRs during the transition (or even after the transition).
  • You can configure the Replication Feeds mechanism at any time without any changes to the CRs.
  • Monitor the Replication Feeds status until all of the existing objects have been verified on the remote site. This can take quite some time as the Swarm nodes each will iterate over their existing streams and verify that these streams exist on the remote cluster.  You can increase the Replication Feeds batch size from the Swarm settings pane to help speed up this process if you like.
  • During this monitoring period, the CRs will continue to notice and replicate any updates/ deletes/ new writes. This is perfectly fine.
  • After the Replication Feed is caught up- that is, the existing streams have been verified on the remote cluster- you can shut off the CRs at your leisure. It is perfectly acceptable to keep both mechanisms running.  
  • Leaving active the publisher process on the Content Routers will allow you to enumerate the clusters in the future using the CR's enumeration process. If you have switched to using an Indexer Feed, this may be superfluous, but this is an option.

© DataCore Software Corporation. · https://www.datacore.com · All rights reserved.