Configure Shard Allocation and Forced Awareness in Elasticsearch

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Configure Shard Allocation and Forced Awareness in Elasticsearch

With Elasticsearch, you have the potential to scale your cluster to be highly available. To ensure your data survives a full zone or rack failure, you can spread your data across multiple zones and use shard allocation awareness to ensure that all replica shards are allocated to a different zone than that of their primary shard. This allows another level of fault tolerance beyond just node failure. In this hands-on lab, you are given the opportunity to exercise the following: * Apply node attributes to each data node in a cluster. * Configure shard allocation awareness for a cluster in multiple zones. * Test shard allocation awareness behavior by stopping all nodes in a zone.

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Lab Info

Level

Advanced

Last updated

Jul 24, 2025

Duration

1h 30m

Challenge

Configure nodes data-1 and data-2 to have a "zone" node attribute with a value of "1".
Using the Secure Shell (SSH), log in to the data-1 and data-2 nodes as cloud_user via the public IP address.

Become the elastic user with:
```
sudo su - elastic
```
In the /home/elastic/elasticsearch/config/elasticsearch.yml file, change the following line:
```
#node.attr.rack: r1
```
to
```
node.attr.zone: 1
```
Restart the elasticsearch node with:
```
pkill -F /home/elastic/elasticsearch/pid
/home/elastic/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch -d -p pid
```
Challenge

Configure nodes data-3 and data-4 to have a "zone" node attribute with a value of "2".
Using the Secure Shell (SSH), log in to the data-3 and data-4 nodes as cloud_user via the public IP address.

Become the elastic user with:
```
sudo su - elastic
```
In the /home/elastic/elasticsearch/config/elasticsearch.yml file, change the following line:
```
#node.attr.rack: r1
```
to
```
node.attr.zone: 2
```
Restart the elasticsearch node with:
```
pkill -F /home/elastic/elasticsearch/pid
/home/elastic/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch -d -p pid
```

Challenge

Enable shard allocation awareness for the cluster per instructions.

Use the Kibana console tool to execute the following:

PUT _cluster/settings
{
  "persistent": {
    "cluster.routing.allocation.awareness.attributes": "zone",
    "cluster.routing.allocation.awareness.force.zone.values": "1,2"
  }
}

Challenge

Stop Elasticsearch on nodes data-3 and data-4.
Using the Secure Shell (SSH), log in to the data-3 and data-4 nodes as cloud_user via the public IP address.

Become the elastic user with:
```
sudo su - elastic
```
Stop the elasticsearch node with:
```
pkill -F /home/elastic/elasticsearch/pid
```
Challenge

Ensure that all primary shards are assigned and all replica shards remain unassigned.
Use the Kibana console tool to execute the following:
```
GET _cat/shards?v
```

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