windows installation the elasticsearch welcome screen should greet you notice your database even has name the name is picked from the pool of marvel characters and changes every time you reboot your database in productionhaving an inconsistent and non-unique name such as this can be problematic the instance you started is single node of what could be part of huge distributed cluster if all of these nodes change names on rebootit becomes nearly impossible to track them with logs in case of trouble elasticsearch takes pride in the fact it has little need for configuration to get you started and is distributed by nature while this is most certainly truethings such as this random name prove that deploying an actual multi-node setup will require you to think twice about certain default settings luckily elasticsearch has adequate documentation on almost everythingincluding deployment (elasticsearch/guide/current/deploy htmlmulti-node elasticsearch deployment isn' in the scope of this but it' good to keep in mind windows installation inwindowselasticsearch also requires at least java --the jre and the jdk--to be installed and for the java_home variable to be pointing at the java folder download the windows installers for java from after installation make sure your java_home windows environment variable points to where you installed the java development kit you can find your environment variables in system control panel advanced system settings see figure figure the java_home variable set to the java install folder