elasticsearch - what to do with unassigned shards

Question

my cluster is with yellow status because some shards are unassigned. what to do with this?

I tried set cluster.routing.allocation.disable_allocation = false to all indexes, but I think this don't work because I'm using version 1.1.1.

I also tried restarting all machines, but same happens.

Any idea?

EDIT :

• Cluster stat :

  { 
    cluster_name: "elasticsearch",
    status: "red",
    timed_out: false,
    number_of_nodes: 5,
    number_of_data_nodes: 4,
    active_primary_shards: 4689,
    active_shards: 4689,
    relocating_shards: 0,
    initializing_shards: 10,
    unassigned_shards: 758
  }
  

Answer 1

There are many possible reason why allocation won't occur:

1. You are running different versions of Elasticsearch on different nodes
2. You only have one node in your cluster, but you have number of replicas set to something other than zero.
3. You have insufficient disk space.
4. You have shard allocation disabled.
5. You have a firewall or SELinux enabled. With SELinux enabled but not configured properly, you will see shards stuck in INITIALIZING or RELOCATING forever.

As a general rule, you can troubleshoot things like this:

1. Look at the nodes in your cluster: curl -s 'localhost:9200/_cat/nodes?v'. If you only have one node, you need to set number_of_replicas to 0. (See ES documentation or other answers).
2. Look at the disk space available in your cluster: curl -s 'localhost:9200/_cat/allocation?v'
3. Check cluster settings: curl 'http://localhost:9200/_cluster/settings?pretty' and look for cluster.routing settings
4. Look at which shards are UNASSIGNED curl -s localhost:9200/_cat/shards?v | grep UNASS

5. Try to force a shard to be assigned

   curl -XPOST -d '{ "commands" : [ {
     "allocate" : {
          "index" : ".marvel-2014.05.21", 
          "shard" : 0, 
          "node" : "SOME_NODE_HERE",
          "allow_primary":true 
        } 
     } ] }' http://localhost:9200/_cluster/reroute?pretty
   

6. Look at the response and see what it says. There will be a bunch of YES's that are ok, and then a NO. If there aren't any NO's, it's likely a firewall/SELinux problem.