Hello, I am new to SolrCloud and Zookeeper, and there's a piece of the puzzle on which I'm unclear. I don't understand whether/how SolrCloud and Zookeeper handles the high availability aspect. That is, once I have the Zookeeper ensemble set up, now how do I reference the collection in a "high-availability" fashion so that if one Solr instance is down, it will automatically route to another instance?
Am I thinking that SolrCloud does more than it actually does? That is, could I instead handle all Load Balancing outside of Zookeeper, and just use our company's network load balancer to route/distribute traffic for a single consolidated URL:port to the different actual Solr Instances/Ports? Here's more details in case it helps: I have an ASP.NET application which uses SolrNet to query and write to a standalone Solr instance. In my program , I specify the hostname:port of my Solr instance: Startup.Init<SolrDoc>("hostname:port"); This setup was used for development and testing. Now, for production, I need to implement Solr in a H.A. fashion so that I don't have a single point of failure. So, following Apache's documentation, I understand that the solution would be to set up an external Zookeeper Ensemble. So, let's say I set up a new Zookeeper Ensemble (three instances). Let's also say I have three Solr instances, #shards = 2, #replicas per shard = 2. Once I have the Zookeeper ensemble set up, now how do I reference the collection? Previously, my code references a single standalone Solr instance, "http://solrserver1:9983". What do I point it to now? If I point it to any of the three Solr instances, and if that instance I'm referencing goes down, it means the request would fail, right? I read similar questions online, for example https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/solrnet/-PeaGrLAMtw/pAfxuoYLVnIJ, and the answer seems to be that SolrNet doesn't support this type of HA. So, do I understand correctly that the load balancing aspect needs to be handled on the client-side (or via a network load balancer), not the zookeeper/solrcloud server side? Thanks, Mike