Towards the goal of modularizing the VIVO application, the search index has been identified as a component that should be installed separately from VIVO and connected to as a remote component.

The initial target is to support externalized:

• Solr 7 and 
• ElasticSearch 6

Requirements

1. Search index must be deployed separately from VIVO
2. Connection from VIVO to search index must be over HTTP
3. Failure to connect to search index on start-up must be non-fatal
4. VIVO must not require a restart in order to connect to search index that was not available on VIVO's initial startup
5. VIVO SmokeTest must make it clear to the user that VIVO is in a non-functional state while a search index is not available
6. Externalized search index must provide the same results as the previous, embedded Solr index