What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Clustered indexers and Load Balanced Indexers?

[dantimola]

Hi Fellow Ninja,

I just want to ask what are the advantages and disadvantages of clustered indexers and Load balanced indexers environment. Let's say I have 3 Heavy Forwarder , 2 Search Head and 6 Indexers, what is your recommendation for this setup?

Thanks,
Dan

[inventsekar · Accepted solution]

indexer cluster will be always helpful -
1. one main reason is that the indexers configuration and app management will become much easier.
2. another important reason would be indexed data availability (as the cluster maintain's more than one copy of the data, if any indexer goes down, still the data will be available on other indexers will be utilized)
3. adding or removing indexers will become easy and simple.
4. the forwarders outputs.conf configuration will become easy when you use indexer discovery (the forwarders will get list of indexers from the indexer cluster deployer. )

only one disadvantage - one more separate dedicated system for deployer is needed

load balanced indexers will just maintain system load only. other listed features will not be available on load balanced indexers.
disadvantage - for this as well, a separate load balancer software you have to use.

[dantimola]

Thanks. 🙂