As always, there are multiple ways of setting up an Elasticsearch cluster. In this case, we will be manually setting up a cluster consisting of one master node and two data nodes, all on Ubuntu 18.04 instances on AWS EC2 running in the same VPC. The security group was configured to enable access from anywhere using SSH and TCP 5601 (Kibana).
Elasticsearch is built on Java and requires at least Java 8 (1.8.0_131 or later) to run. Our first step, therefore, is to install Java 8 on all the nodes in the cluster. Please note that the same version should be installed on all Elasticsearch nodes in the cluster.
Repeat the following steps on all the servers designated for your cluster.
First, update your system:
sudo apt-get updateThen, install Java with:
sudo apt-get install default-jreOur next step is to install Elasticsearch. As before, repeat the steps in this section on all your servers.
First, you need to add Elastic’s signing key so that the downloaded package can be verified (skip this step if you’ve already installed packages from Elastic):
wget -qO - https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch | sudo apt-key add -For Debian, we need to then install the apt-transport-https package:
sudo apt-get install apt-transport-httpsThe next step is to add the repository definition to your system:
echo "deb https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/6.x/apt stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/elastic-6.x.listAll that’s left to do is to update your repositories and install Elasticsearch:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install elasticsearchOur next step is to set up the cluster so that the nodes can connect and communicate with each other. For each node, open the Elasticsearch configuration file:
sudo vim /etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.ymlThis file is quite long, and contains multiple settings for different sections. Browse through the file, and enter the following configurations (replace the IPs with your node IPs):
#give your cluster a name.
cluster.name: my-cluster
#give your nodes a name (change node number from node to node).
node.name: "es-node-1"
#define node 1 as master-eligible:
node.master: true
#define nodes 2 and 3 as data nodes:
node.data: true
#enter the private IP and port of your node:
network.host: 172.11.61.27
http.port: 9200
#detail the private IPs of your nodes:
discovery.zen.ping.unicast.hosts: ["172.11.61.27", "172.31.22.131","172.31.32.221"]Save and exit.
You are now ready to start your Elasticsearch nodes and verify they are communicating with each other as a cluster.
For each instance, run the following command:
sudo service elasticsearch startTo enable elasticsearch on system startup
sudo systemctl enable elasticsearchIf everything was configured correctly, your Elasticsearch cluster should be up and running. To verify everything is working as expected, query Elasticsearch from any of the cluster nodes:
curl -XGET 'http://localhost:9200/_cluster/state?pretty'The response should detail the cluster and its nodes:
{
"cluster_name" : "my-cluster",
"compressed_size_in_bytes" : 351,
"version" : 4,
"state_uuid" : "3LSnpinFQbCDHnsFv-Z8nw",
"master_node" : "IwEK2o1-Ss6mtx50MripkA",
"blocks" : { },
"nodes" : {
"IwEK2o1-Ss6mtx50MripkA" : {
"name" : "es-node-2",
"ephemeral_id" : "x9kUrr0yRh--3G0ckESsEA",
"transport_address" : "172.31.50.123:9300",
"attributes" : { }
},
"txM57a42Q0Ggayo4g7-pSg" : {
"name" : "es-node-1",
"ephemeral_id" : "Q370o4FLQ4yKPX4_rOIlYQ",
"transport_address" : "172.31.62.172:9300",
"attributes" : { }
},
"6YNZvQW6QYO-DX31uIvaBg" : {
"name" : "es-node-3",
"ephemeral_id" : "mH034-P0Sku6Vr1DXBOQ5A",
"transport_address" : "172.31.52.220:9300",
"attributes" : { }
}
},
…Install packages for NFS client mounting
sudo apt update
sudo apt install nfs-commonNow that the host server is configured and serving its shares, we’ll prepare our client.
In order to make the remote shares available on the client, we need to mount the directories on the host that we want to share to empty directories on the client.
Note: If there are files and directories in your mount point, they will become hidden as soon as you mount the NFS share. To avoid the loss of important files, be sure that if you mount in a directory that already exists that the directory is empty.
We’ll create two directories for our mounts:
sudo mkdir -p /nfs/elasticsearchNow that we have a location to put the remote shares and we’ve opened the firewall, we can mount the shares by addressing our host server, which in this docs is 203.0.113.0:
sudo mount 203.0.113.0:/var/nfs/elasticsearch /nfs/elasticsearchThese commands will mount the shares from the host computer onto the client machine. You can double-check that they mounted successfully in several ways. You can check this with a plain mount or findmnt command, but df -h provides a more easily readable output that illustrates how disk usage is displayed differently for the NFS shares:
df -hOutput
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 238M 0 238M 0% /dev
tmpfs 49M 628K 49M 2% /runv /dev/vda1 20G 1.2G 18G 7% /
tmpfs 245M 0 245M 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 245M 0 245M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 49M 0 49M 0% /run/user/0v 203.0.113.0:/var/nfs/elasticsearch 20G 1.2G 18G 7% /nfs/elasticsearch
Next, let’s test access to the shares by writing something to each of them. Create a file in Elasticsearch
sudo touch /nfs/elasticsearch/elastic.testThen look at the ownership of the file:
ls -l /nfs/elasticsearch/elastic.testOutput -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 28 13:32 /nfs/elasticsearch/elastic.test
We can mount the remote NFS shares automatically at boot by adding them to /etc/fstab file on the client. Open this file with root privileges in your text editor:
sudo nano /etc/fstab. . . 203.0.113.0:/var/nfs/elasticsearch /nfs/elasticsearch nfs auto,nofail,noatime,nolock,intr,tcp,actimeo=1800 0 0
Open elasticsearch configuration file, for each node
sudo vim /etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.ymlchange the data directory as follows using our above NFS mount
# Path to directory where to store index data allocated for this node.
path.data: /nfs/elasticsearch
restart elasticsearch service
sudo service elasticsearch restart
I did pritty much the same as above for our elastic but i read a lot of people saying not to do it.
Lets see if it holds up long term :)