How to add more nodes to an existing elastic search

[eliumoraes]

Hello guys,

I'm new to Elasticsearch and started to work on a company that assigned me a taqsk to add more nodes in an existing environment.

We are using the integration between Elastic and Azure in our environment.
We currently have only one node:

I need to create more nodes, but I am not findind how to do it.

There is an option to create deployment, but I am not sure if it that is where I should go, if I create another deployment it will be separated or will be in the same cluster?

I found this video: Running Elasticsearch on Azure | Aravind Putrevu | AzConfDev2020 - YouTube that shows how to create one node, it looks like when you create for the first time there is an option to set how many nodes you want. We have the same envinronment as this video show.

But he does not show how to add a new node after having the first one running.

[SamuelSMendes (Samuel S. Mendes Soares)]

I had this adventure before and got some results here, some videos on youtube also explains how to do so but alot of them makes uses of SSL, which can be a bit hard to follow on the first take.

The most basic (but nothing secure) configuration I found that worked is the one below that was made using 2 computers in the same network.

Hope it helps you achieve the results.

`

[eliumoraes]

I saw this page as well. I am able to create more nodes in my local env, but Azure is integrated with Elastic Cloud and that environment I am not finding any way to do the same.

For example, there is not a function or button that says: create a new node.
There some to create warm and froze instances, there also an option to add 'Coordinating instances' that I have no idea of the meaning...

But I cannot find the option to add more nodes.

I found the options to resize the actual node, to add more zones, to add more memory and also a option to add another deployment.

[stephenb (Stephen Brown)]

Hi @eliumoraes Welcome to the community and thanks for Trying Elastic Cloud on Azure.

@eliumoraes

I found the options to resize the actual node, to add more zones, to add more memory and also a option to add another deployment.

You can reconfigure your deployment by Scaling Vertically or Adding More nodes or Both from the Elastic Cloud Console

There are a few constraints though.

1. If you are in a single zone... must scale to the maximum node size before you will get multiple nodes. In General that is 60GB of RAM.

2. If you add a zone it will add the same size node(s) to the additional zone.

3. Rule 1 Applies for multiple zones as well you need to scale vertically first and additional nodes of the 60 GB will be added.

If you go to the Deployments Edit Screen you can see this.

1 x 8GB Hot x 1 Zone

1 x 8GB x 2 Zones :
Note 2+ zone is often referred to high availability configuration and a Primary and Replica Shard will never be on the same node so it does suit that purpose, but you can also think of it as just a 2nd / additional node.. it will function just like and additional node it is just in a 2nd zone.

2 x 60GB x 20 Zones = 120GB x 2 Zones

You Can also see this in the Deployments Overview View

Hope this helps! Let us Know.

[eliumoraes]

Hi @stephenb! Thank you very much!
I can see now! That was exacly what I was looking for.

[joao.mil (João)]

What if I want to scale beyond 3 nodes?

[stephenb (Stephen Brown)]

@joao.mil

What if I want to scale beyond 3 nodes?

See Rule 3 ... When you scale past 60GB in each zone additional nodes will be added equally in each zone.

@stephenb

There are a few constraints though.

1. If you are in a single zone... must scale to the maximum node size before you will get multiple nodes. In General that is 60GB of RAM.
2. If you add a zone it will add the same size node(s) to the additional zone.
3. Rule 1 Applies for multiple zones as well you need to scale vertically first and additional nodes of the 60 GB will be added.

[joao.mil (João)]

Right. I didn't see the small 2 in the orange circles.
But why is there no possibility to add nodes with smaller configurations?

[stephenb (Stephen Brown)]

@joao.mil

Right. I didn't see the small 2 in the orange circles.
But why is there no possibility to add nodes with smaller configurations?

Not supported today, perhaps in the future.

There are some discussion of the value of that, there is probably for some very specific use cases where that could be advantage but in general not as much

In general
3 x 60GB Nodes striped across 3 AZs is pretty much equivalent to 6 x 30GB nodes striped across the 3 AZs from a Compute(cpu), RAM, Disk, I/O perspective...

[joao.mil (João)]

Thanks a lot for your reply!
In our use case we are trying to understand why the number of requests per second that ES is able to respond in a reasonable time doesn't seem to scale if we just use the next setting (usually means doubling CPU or memory). We were wondering if just adding more nodes could be the solution (i.e. scaling horizontally, not vertically).
Are there other settings we can tune with here?

[stephenb (Stephen Brown)]

@joao.mil

Are there other settings we can tune with here?

Ahhh Ok so you are talking about tuning... there are many questions / answers to tuning. (Write Tuning, Read Tuning etc..)

There are also different HW profiles that could closer match your use case... CPU optimized etc for search use cases etc.

Yes in short adding more capacity if you are just trying to do too much with too little may help, but there could be other answers ...

If you want help tuning I would open a Thread with as much detail as possible and a good subject line.

And of course there are docs With lots of suggestions

Open a thread tell us what is going on and what you want...