Centos 6.* comes with Python 2.6, but we can't just replace it with v2.7 because it's used by the OS internally (apparently) so you will need to install v2.7 (or 3.x, for that matter) along with it. Fortunately, CentOS made this quite painless with their Software Collections Repository

sudo yum update # update yum
sudo yum install centos-release-scl # install SCL 
sudo yum install python27 # install Python 2.7

To use it, you essentially spawn another shell (or script) while enabling the newer version of Python:

#Installing Elasticsearch 2.0 on CentOS 7

##Overview This gist describes how to install Elasticsearch 2.0 on CentOS 7. Some of this information is straight from the Elasticsearch site, some of it is specific to CentOS 7, and a lot of it is specific to the enviroment I was creating at the time for syslog capture. YMMV.

If you are using a different OS you can probably adapt these instructions, but I recommend going over the official documentation first.

##Assumptions and Background Each node in the cluster was a clean install of CentOS 7. I used the "Compute Node" installation option with no additional packages.