Windows support for Elasticsearch?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hey there,

I see Windows is in the support matrix at https://www.elastic.co/support/matrix​.
Is Windows really a "first class citizen" platform for Elasticsearch? Does anybody have experience with Elastic support (e.g. Elastic subscription) on this platform? Are there any "blind spots" in coverage/support on this platform?
I'm asking as, while I would prefer to stick to Linux, I will have customers that will require Windows installations.

Thanks!

2

Only for the unsupported OSs :slight_smile:

What makes you ask this, what sort of concerns do you have?

3

Concern is that if we go for Elastic support we might get issues on Windows (supported OSes) and get an answer like "You should be using Linux, we do not support functionality X fully on Windows" (I've seen that on other products). Any known restrictions?

Also, if anyone has experiences with subscription support, I would love to hear them.

Thanks!

4

You will not get that.

5

You will find that, specifically, certain OS-level statistics aren't available on Windows. For example, on linux, /proc/diskstats is read because it's looks like a filesystem read, but that isn't available on Windows.

(I edited your post so your link wouldn't 404. I hope you don't mind.)

6

Yer, but in terms of Elasticsearch functionality there is nothing that only works on one OS.

7

Thanks all! Good answers!

8

The concurrent merge scheduler does not auto-detect spinning disks versus solid-state storage devices on any OS except for Linux. On non-Linux systems, by default, it assumes that the underlying storage is spinning and uses a single merge thread.

9

The test coverage for the startup scripts isn't good on Windows either. We
test lots of stuff in Linux but we do it with bash....

Few engineers use Windows to develop elasticsearch but a handful do so I
expect decent coverage. We build on all the supported OSes with Jenkins so
that is good.