ElasticSearch: Unassigned Shards, how to fix?

Question

I have an ES cluster with 4 nodes:

number_of_replicas: 1
search01 - master: false, data: false
search02 - master: true, data: true
search03 - master: false,          


        

Answer 1

I just first increased the

"index.number_of_replicas"

by 1 (wait until nodes are synced) then decreased it by 1 afterwards, which effectively removes the unassigned shards and cluster is Green again without the risk of losing any data.

I believe there are better ways but this is easier for me.

Hope this helps.