Migrating from Local Lucene Files to External Solr Indexing Server
Assuming you have local Lucene indexing files in $MM_HOME/data/search and successfully set up an external Solr Indexing Server as defined above, then restarting the MM Application Server will go on using your local Lucene index and therefore remain operational while populating the external Solr Indexing Server.
The MM Application Server will automatically make the switch to the external Solr Indexing Server once ready. This process may take many hours depending on the size of the repository to index. It is recommended to stop any metadata harvesting / model import during that process so that the index migration can complete as quickly as possible. This process can be checked by monitoring the Search Server section of MANAGE > System.
Once the upgrade process is complete, you can recover the local space by deleting / backing up the local index located at $MM_HOME/data/search .