Deploy 4 Filr appliances (minimum) in a Filr cluster (farm).
Locate 3 behind a load-balancing / round-robin switch.
Dedicate 1 to Filr administration and to Net Folder synchronization and indexing.
Include the dedicated appliance in the farm, but do not include it in the load balancing/round robin configuration.
Disable Net Folder synchronization on the 3 load-balanced Filr appliances so that any scheduled synchronizations are forced to occur on the dedicated appliance.
For instructions, see Dedicating a Filr Appliance to Indexing and Net Folder Synchronization
in the Filr: Installation, Deployment, and Upgrade Guide.
When upgrading, use the dedicated appliance as the test
appliance as follows:
Shut down all other appliances
Upgrade the dedicated appliance.
Make sure the appliance is performing as expected before upgrading the other three Filr appliances and bringing the Filr system back online.
To help balance the load between REST requests (from the Filr desktop and mobile applications), and web browser requests, configure the L4 switch to direct REST requests to one of the three load-balanced Filr appliances and web requests to another Filr appliance. (The third load-balanced Filr appliance can continue to service both request types.)
As a best practice, you should always leave the CPU setting on Filr Appliances at 4 CPUs.
Do not set the CPUs on the dedicated Filr appliance at less than 4 CPU's.