Should nodes of an ES cluster be identical (OS, RAM, CPU, ...)?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

In an Elasticsearch cluster, should all nodes be identical concerning:

  • Operating System
  • Amount of RAM
  • CPU speed and number of cores
  • etc.

or are they allowed to be different?

Note: this question does not concern the fact that, obviously, an homogeneous cluster would be much easier to configure, manage, and monitor.

Thanks in advance.

2

You should probably run the same JVM but the CPU model, amount of memory etc doesn't matter. But since the cluster's shards are balanced evenly across the nodes you'll want to keep the nodes pretty similar.

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3

For data nodes, yes.
Master and client nodes can be different.

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