These instructions are on Mac OS X, but it can easily be translated for any linux os too. The only differences will be to use default in elasticsearch.yml for vbuckets of 1024 (comment or take that line out). Also the paths to plugins, config, bin, etc. might be different as far as copying the couchbase_template.json over to config/templates.
On Mac I highly recommend just permanently increasing the max number of file descriptors allowed (unlimited is no longer a valid parameter):
$ cd /etc
$ vi launchd.conf
$ limit maxfiles 1000000 1000000