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I'd agree with this, but I also had quite a bit of success with using indexer/search nodes as master-eligible, and then basically 'pin' (manually) the master node to one completely dedicated host. That's one complaint about ES, there's no way to set master preference among a set of master-eligible nodes.

Yup. We're thinking about that too. We've been monitoring node performance closely to see when we'll need to shift the topology around a bit. I'd want to keep our clusters small and the topology uniform before I investigate dedicated master nodes though.

FYI: From my experience (on older ES versions) when you hit problems with it, they will be pretty bad, catastrophic problems. We run dedicated master nodes, but have the master servers running multiple ES instances, so they can serve as masters for multiple clusters.

Spot on regarding dedicated masters.