Is it possible to use Splunk on a Windows machine as a cluster master for Splunk indexers on Linux machines?

[hettervik]

Hi.

I have an environment with two Splunk indexers running on VMs with Linux OS, and I want to create an indexer cluster. My third VM is a Windows machine, and I want to use this VM to create a cluster master for the indexer cluster. Due to resource restraints, I can't (easily) get another VM, and reinstalling the OS from Windows to Linux on the machine would also be a hassle as the task would have to be outsourced (I don't "own" the VM myself). Is it possible to use Splunk on a Windows machine as a cluster master for an indexer cluster running on Linux machines? If it is possible, are there any restraints or drawbacks I should know about?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks a lot!

[gfuente · Accepted solution]

Hello

As per documentation, all nodes should run the same OS:

 Each node instance must run on a separate machine or VM, and each machine must be running the same operating system.

http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/6.0/Indexer/Systemrequirements

Regards

[hettervik]

Thanks! I did read this in the doc, but I was wondering about the strictness of this requirement. As per today we're running search heads on Windows and indexers on Linux, and it's working perfectly fine, though this is not a clustered environment.

It makes sense that the indexers would have to be running the same OS when clustered, but does the search heads really have to be running the same OS as well? Or is his "only" highly recommended?