Sometimes, there is a need of removing one or more replicas from your Solr cluster. Either because you want to get rid of some nodes and you want your cluster state to become clean or you want to move some shard to another node and delete the original shard. No matter what the case is, there might come a time where you need to delete a shard. This recipe will show you how to do it.
Before reading further, I advise you to read the Creating a new SolrCloud cluster and Having more than a single shard from a collection on a node recipes in this chapter. These recipes will show you how to create a new SolrCloud cluster and create a collection. We also assume that ZooKeeper is running on 192.168.1.10 and is listening on port 2181. We already have the configuration called firstcollection stored in ZooKeeper and we already have four SolrCloud nodes running as a cluster.