Kindly tear down whole search head clustering setup. Edit server.conf in $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/system/local and remove [shclustering] and [replication_port] stanza from each search head and restart them. Also remove [shclustering] stanza from server.conf on deployer in $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/system/local and restart. In my case I first followed above steps and then did whole clustering setup and it worked. don't forget to restart search heads and deployer after tearing the setup. I hope this helps. ... View more