@mike_bronson7 To achieve your goal for the 2 issues you will need to edit server.properties of Kafka to add the following line. auto.leader.rebalance.enable = false Then run the below assuming you are having a zookeeper quorum of host1;host2,host3 bin/kafka-preferred-replica-election.sh --zookeeper host1:2181,host2:2181,host3:2181/kafka This should balance your partitions you can validate with bin/kafka-topics.sh --zookeeper host1:2181,host2:2181,host3:2181/kafka --describe For the second issue with the lost broker, you need to create a new broker and update the broker.id with the previous broker's id which was not gone or not recoverable then run $ kafka-preferred-replica-election.sh to balance the topics.
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