Elasticsearch clustering on multiple machines - master election

Question

I am trying to implement elasticsearch cluster. I have 2 machines with 2 nodes each. I have following configuration in yml file. I have given unique node name on each node, all of them are master and data nodes.

cluster.name: elasticsearch
node.master: true
node.data: true
discovery.zen.ping.multicast.enabled: false
discovery.zen.ping.unicast.hosts: ["machine1", "machine2"]
discovery.zen.minimum_master_nodes: 3

the four nodes are working correctly in the cluster. I would like to bring one of the nodes down, and have other 3 run in the cluster. When I try to bring one of first three, cluster goes down, I get this error

{
   "error": "ClusterBlockException[blocked by: [SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE/1/state not recovered / initialized];]",
   "status": 503
}

If I bring down the last node that joined cluster, the cluster works fine. my understanding is, if I have 4 masters and one of the master (any) goes down, other three masters should run in the cluster. is there any issue with my configuration?

Answer 1

If you are running to nodes on one machine, it is probably better to add ports to your configuration.

 discovery.zen.ping.unicast.hosts: ["machine1:9300", "machine2:9300", "machine2:9301"]

Than also configure the ports yourself so you know which node has which port:

 transport.tcp.port: 9300
 http.port: 9200