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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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Path Info

Level
Clock icon Advanced
Duration
Clock icon 1h 30m
Last updated
Clock icon Jul 24, 2025

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Table of Contents

  1. 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

  2. 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

  3. 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"
  }
}

  4. 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

  5. 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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