# What's the characteristics and criterion of choosing master and search (kibana) nodes

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/whats-the-characteristics-and-criterion-of-choosing-master-and-search-kibana-nodes/282695>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [August 27, 2021, 5:15pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/whats-the-characteristics-and-criterion-of-choosing-master-and-search-kibana-nodes/282695 "2021-08-27T17:15:55Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![marone](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/marone/32/87145_2.png) [@marone](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/marone)\
**Post date:** [August 27, 2021, 5:15pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/whats-the-characteristics-and-criterion-of-choosing-master-and-search-kibana-nodes/282695/1 "2021-08-27T17:15:55Z")

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Hey I am trying to design a cluster in a real use case, it's well-known that when we have more then 5 data nodes, the number of master nodes should be 3 (at least if I am wrong), but I can't decide the characteritics of each master nodes (RAM size, number of CPUs, disk space).

Same problem goes for Kibana (search) nodes, I have to take into consideration: the number of users, overall requests sent to elasticsearch nodes, number of dashboards, number of visualization, ML jobs or not, etc. How can I decide the RAM size between 8 GB or 16GB, for example if I have 10 users.

I looked on this article about [Benchmarking and sizing your Elasticsearch cluster for logs and metrics](https://www.elastic.co/blog/benchmarking-and-sizing-your-elasticsearch-cluster-for-logs-and-metrics) but don't tell answers about my questions!

Any feedback is highly appreciated as I am quite beginner in designing elastic clusters 😄

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [September 24, 2021, 5:15pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/whats-the-characteristics-and-criterion-of-choosing-master-and-search-kibana-nodes/282695/2 "2021-09-24T17:15:59Z")

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