Emily Chang shows how to find and fix unassigned shards in Elasticsearch:
As nodes join and leave the cluster, the master node reassigns shards automatically, ensuring that multiple copies of a shard aren’t assigned to the same node. In other words, the master node will not assign a primary shard to the same node as its replica, nor will it assign two replicas of the same shard to the same node. A shard may linger in an unassigned state if there are not enough nodes to distribute the shards accordingly.
To avoid this issue, make sure that every index in your cluster is initialized with fewer replicas per primary shard than the number of nodes in your cluster by following the formula below:
N >= R + 1Where N is the number of nodes in your cluster, and R is the largest shard replication factor across all indices in your cluster.
Read the whole thing if you’re an Elasticsearch administrator.