Sitecore 8.1 share lucene index

Question

We have deployed the sitecore on to azure web apps. From what I read, the azure web apps instances share the common file share. For example, if we have 3xCD all of them will share the compiled code including assets and indexes etc. As a result we are getting "Lucene.Net.Store.LockObtainFailedException"

Sitecore 8.1 : Lucene.Net.Store.LockObtainFailedException

If we have 3xCD , is it possible to configure each CD instance to share the common lucene index so that each instances doesn't try to rebuilt the index.

Answer 1

No. Lucene indexes are local to the Sitecore server. You'll need to use Solr to achieve what you want. One of the reasons the Solr option was introduced was to solve this problem. It provides access to the index over HTTP.

The following Stack Overflow question was answered by one of the architects of the Sitecore ContentSearch functionality:

When to definitely use SOLR over Lucene in a Sitecore 7 build?

It discusses the pros and cons of Solr vs Lucene.

Answer 2

Martin is correct. Lucene indexes can not be shared and Solr's can be. However, I would add Coveo is a viable option as well and provides more out of the box functionality around search.

You can learn more about coveo here