# Phase out VM from cluster

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/phase-out-vm-from-cluster/338422>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [July 14, 2023, 2:34pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/phase-out-vm-from-cluster/338422 "2023-07-14T14:34:10Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![YvorL](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/9fc348/32.png) [@YvorL](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/YvorL)\
**Post date:** [July 14, 2023, 2:34pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/phase-out-vm-from-cluster/338422/1 "2023-07-14T14:34:10Z")

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Hi,  
I have an issue where one of my hot nodes has a larger disk than needed. Since I can't downsize the disk and due to the volume of data, I can't simply copy over to a smaller disk.  
So I thought it'd be the easiest (not the cheapest) way to:

1. Exclude the VM from shard allocation. ([doc](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/modules-cluster.html#cluster-shard-allocation-filtering))
2. Move the shards away to other nodes, and let ES figure out the balancing.

However, I have over 200 shards, and each shard is between 40-50GB, and it looks really tedious to do it manually. Is there a way to make this faster or automate the process without writing a script?

Thank you!

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**Author:** ![leandrojmp](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/leandrojmp/32/107231_2.png) [@leandrojmp](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/leandrojmp)\
**Post date:** [July 14, 2023, 2:43pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/phase-out-vm-from-cluster/338422/2 "2023-07-14T14:43:51Z")

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> [@YvorL](#):
>
> However, I have over 200 shards, and each shard is between 40-50GB, and it looks really tedious to do it manually

You won't need to move anything manually, as soon as you exclude the node from shard allocation elasticsearch will start moving the shards out of this node to other nodes on the cluster.

But depending on the number and size of the shards this can take some time.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![YvorL](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/9fc348/32.png) [@YvorL](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/YvorL)\
**Post date:** [July 14, 2023, 2:50pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/phase-out-vm-from-cluster/338422/3 "2023-07-14T14:50:57Z")

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Ah, I see. Thank you @leandrojmp That's good to know!  
Since I have the cluster in one DC with great resources & bandwidth, what settings can I change to max out the rebalancing operation speed and concurrency?

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [August 11, 2023, 2:51pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/phase-out-vm-from-cluster/338422/4 "2023-08-11T14:51:26Z")

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