Elastic search installation questions on RHEL

Question

I am working to install elastic search on a LINUX box. As I understand, there are couple of options like tar and RPM. I am not sure on difference between those two. I find tar very easy to download and unzip... Please help explain when you chose tar vs RPM or other options.

Also - I have multiple JRE versions on my servers. Is there a way to specify JRE path to Elastic configuration? At this point I exported JAVA_HOME and started Elastic Search?

Answer 1

tar is a compressed file containing the required binary / config / other files for your application.

RPM is a package manager which allows easier installation of the files which are contained in a tar or multiple tar files.

using a package manager is usually preferable as it can install dependencies and allow cleaner removal or updating of applications.

Answer 2

After installation, I was also facing "bootstrap checks failed" every time I tried to put network.host to M/C IP.

Below changes solved the problem -

network.host: 0.0.0.0
http.port: 9200
transport.host: localhost
transport.tcp.port: 9300