We want your experience with Elastic Cloud Enterprise to be a success, so we compiled a list of tried-and-tested prerequisites that will help you install and run our software successfully. To make it easier to look through these prerequisites, we separated them into sections for hardware, software, users, and networking.
Hardware
The following hardware specifications for host machines work well with Elastic Cloud Enterprise:
- Memory: At least 8 GB of RAM, 64 GB or more preferred
Storage:
- For allocators handling user requests: Enough storage to support the RAM-to-storage ratio. For example, if you use a host with 16 GB of RAM and the default ratio of 1:32, provide 512 GB of disk space.
- For hosts that will hold other runner roles, such as coordinators, directors and proxies: At least 10 GB of disk space.
Software
The following software works well with Elastic Cloud Enterprise:
One of the following Linux distributions (see Limitations):
- Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr)
- Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus)
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 or later
CentOS 7 or later
Amazon Linux is not currently supported. If you attempt to install Elastic Cloud Enterprise on Amazon Linux, installation will likely fail with an error.
- Linux kernel 3.10 or higher
- Docker 1.11
File system:
- We recommend that you use XFS, but any file system that supports the OverlayFS storage driver used by Docker can be used.
- XFS is required if you want to use disk space quotas for Elasticsearch data directories.
-
On RHEL and CentOS, XFS file systems must be created with the
-n ftype=1option to make sure they can work with the OverlayFS storage driver used by Docker.
- If SELinux is enabled: Your SELinux configuration must allow mounting Docker sockets into containers (required for cluster management to work)
Elastic Cloud Enterprise is certified for Linux kernel 3.10 or higher and Docker 1.11. The latter is the only version of Docker Elastic recommends.
If you intend to use Docker 1.12 or higher, please note:
- You should avoid Linux kernel version 4.4 or lower, as there is a known issue with kernel memory (kmem) accounting.
-
You should disable kernel memory accounting for all memory cgroups by passing the
cgroup.memory=nokmemparameter to the kernel at boot time. - While Elastic Cloud Enterprise may work with these Docker and kernel versions, it has not been thoroughly tested with them and might have issues. Elastic will attempt to support Elastic Cloud Enterprise running Docker version 1.12 or higher and kernel version 4.5 or higher, but we might not be able to resolve issues related to these configurations. In such cases, you will be asked to move to a certified kernel and Docker version, so that Elastic can support you.
Users
The following users and permissions are required:
-
To prepare your environment: A user with sudo permissions, such as the
elasticuser included with our AWS AMIs or the ubuntu user provided on Ubuntu. -
To install Elastic Cloud Enterprise: A user who is part of the
dockergroup. You should not install Elastic Cloud Enterprise as therootuser.
You can find out information about a user with the id command:
id uid=1000(elastic) gid=1000(elastic) groups=1000(elastic),4(adm),20(dialout),24(cdrom),25(floppy),27(sudo),29(audio),30(dip),44(video),46(plugdev),102(netdev),112(libvirtd),1001(docker)
In this example, the user elastic belongs to both the sudo and the docker groups.
Networking
The first host you install Elastic Cloud Enterprise on initially requires the ports for all roles to be open, which includes the ports for the coordinator, allocator, director, and proxy roles. After you have brought up your initial Elastic Cloud Enterprise installation, only the ports for the roles that the initial host continues to hold need to remain open.
The following networking or internet access is required for Elastic Cloud Enterprise:
- Internet access for a typical installation (offline installation is supported)
Outbound traffic open on the following ports:
Host role Outbound ports Purpose All
80
Installation script and container-registry.elastic.co Docker registry access (HTTP)
All
443
Installation script and container-registry.elastic.co Docker registry access (HTTPS)
Inbound traffic open from any source on the following ports:
Host role Inbound ports Purpose All
22
Required for troubleshooting
Coordinator
12300
Elastic support access (HTTP)
Coordinator
12343
Elastic support access (HTTPS)
Coordinator
12400
Cloud UI and API access to the administration console (HTTP)
Coordinator
12443
Cloud UI and API access to the administration console (HTTPS)
Proxy
9200/9243
Kibana and Elasticsearch (HTTP/HTTPS), also required by load balancers
Proxy
9300/9343
Elasticsearch (transport client/transport client with TLS/SSL), also required by load balancers
Internal components of Elastic Cloud Enterprise require inbound traffic open on the following ports:
Host role Inbound ports Purpose Coordinator
8764
Services forwarder for the administration console
Coordinator
22191-22195
Connections to initial coordinator from allocators and proxies (for up to five coordinators)
Director
12191-12301, 12898-12908, 13898-13908
ZooKeeper stunnels (typically up to five)
Director
2112
ZooKeeper ensemble discovery/joining
Allocator
18000-20000
Elasticsearch (HTTP and transport)
A typical ECE installation should be contained within a single data center. We recommend that Elastic Cloud Enterprise installations not span different data centers, due to variations in networking latency and bandwidth that cannot be controlled.
Installation of Elastic Cloud Enterprise across multiple data centers might be feasible with sufficiently low latency and high bandwidth, with some restrictions around what we can support. Based on our experience with our hosted Elastic Cloud service, the following is required:
- A typical network latency between the data centers of less than 10ms round-trip time during pings
- A network bandwidth of at least 10 Gigabit
If you choose to deploy a single ECE installation across multiple data centers, you might need to contend with additional disruptions due to bandwidth or latency issues. Both ECE and Elasticsearch are designed to be resilient to networking issues, but this resiliency is intended to handle exceptions and should not be depended on as part of normal operations. If Elastic determines during a support case that an issue is related to an installation across multiple data centers, the recommended resolution will be to consolidate your installation into a single data center, with further support limited until consolidation is complete.