There are a number of questions that you need to ask yourself in order to inform the development of a smooth deployment strategy for Solr. The deployment process should ideally be fully scripted and integrated into the existing Configuration Management (CM) process of your application.
Note
Configuration Management is the task of tracking and controlling changes in the software. CM attempts to make the changes that occur in software knowable as it evolves to mitigate mistakes caused due to those changes.
The list of questions that you'll want to answer to work in conjunction with your operations team includes:
How similar is my deployment environment to my development and test environments? Can I project that if one Solr instance was enough to meet my load requirements in test, then it is also applicable to the load expected in production based on having similar physical hardware?
Do I need multiple Solr servers to meet the projected load or for...