Search affinity for non-multisite cluster

[oliverj]

I have 2 locations, and not a ton of resources. Multisite clustering took too much -- it seems like I need at least 3 indexers (or maybe it was 2 per site). But, I only have 2 indexers, so I decided a multisite cluster was more then I needed. Instead, I set up a basic index cluster that I was hoping to have span multiple locations. Main goal = data safety. 2 copies of active splunk indexes, plus backups at each location looks to be exactly what I need.

But, my pipe between sites is pretty limited. Ideally, my search head would be tied to a specific indexer, so I am not trying to pull data across sites. I looked at affinity (but that is multisite only) and distributed search (but that is non-cluster only). Is it possible to restrict my SearchHead1 to only search Indexer1?

[oliverj · Accepted solution]

It seems I was wrong about not being able to use multisite clustering with only 2 peers.
I found this thread, which indicated that I need to override the default replication factor of 2.
By adding in the

replication_factor = 1
search_factor = 1

In addition to:

site_replication_factor = origin:1,total:2
site_search_factor = origin:1,total:2

I was able to successfully start the splunk process.
Now, I should be able to set up a searchhead at each site, with affinity for its own site instead of searching across both indexers across the net.