How to migrate index without disturbing client?

Hello,

I am running a cluster which contains many indexes. In the near future I will have new machines so that I will need to migrate my indexes to those machines. I have thought some scenarios but it will not be possible to do so. Let me explain what I thought and why it was not possible;

  • I wanted to put the new machines into existing cluster and then I thought I could use exclude._ip option to exclude existing machines. So that old indexes would have migrated.
  • I cannot restart the cluster because I have 9 tera of data so it can take one day to restart all cluster.

This seemed possible for me but I can not stop working on the index, users should continue making searches on the indexes. So can you please tell me how I can migrate the data without disturbing clients ?

Thank you

For posterity, this topic has been discussed here: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/elasticsearch/v4hZe6MHoEw/discussion