Known Issues and Workarounds in Cloudera Director

Cloudera Director does not recognize changes in the admin password in Cloudera Manager unless the username associated with the new password is also changed.

Cloudera Director is unable to resize XFS partitions, which makes creating an instance that uses the XFS filesystem fail during bootstrap.

Workaround: Use an image with an ext filesystem such as ext2, ext3, or ext4.

The default RHEL 6 image defined in director-google-plugin version 1.0.1 and lower has an incorrect yum repo definition. This causes yum commands to fail after yum caches are cleared. See the Google Compute Engine issue tracker for issue details.

Workaround: Use the image rhel-6-20160119 or higher.

Cloudera Director cannot set up external databases for Sqoop2.

Workaround: Set up databases for this service as described in Cloudera Manager and Managed Service Databases.

Kafka requires a nonintuitive version string to be specified in the configuration file or UI.

Workaround: Use the following format to specify a version string in the cluster configuration section of the configuration file or UI. For example, to deploy Kafka 1.4 in a cluster, specify 0.8.2.0-1.kafka1.4 or 0.8, instead of 1.4.

Clusters deployed in Cloudera Manager version 5.4 and lower might not have metrics displayed in the UI if these clusters share the same name as previously deleted clusters.

Workaround: Use Cloudera Manager 5.5 and higher.

When growing or shrinking a cluster, you have the option of restarting the cluster. The restart operation should only restart roles that are marked stale by Cloudera Manager—that is, roles that need to be restarted. This prevents unnecessary cluster downtime. However, with Cloudera Manager 5.5.x and lower, some stale roles might not be restarted, even if you select the Restart Cluster option.

Workaround: Go to Cloudera Manager, select the roles marked as stale, and restart them. This will be fixed in a future release.

When you set up HDFS high availability using Cloudera Director, the secondary NameNode is not configured, because it is not required for high availability. Because of a Cloudera Manager bug, the absence of a secondary NameNode causes an erroneous validation error to appear in Cloudera Manager in HDFS > Configuration > HDFS Checkpoint Directories.

Workaround: Update the field with a value for the checkpoint directory—for example, /data/dfs/snn (the value isn't important, because it is not used)—and save.

Depending on the size of your cluster and your instance types, you may need to manually increase the memory limits for the Host Monitor and Service Monitor. Cloudera Manager displays a configuration validation warning or error if the memory limits are insufficient.

Workaround: Override firehose_heapsize for HOSTMONITOR and SERVICES with a different value in bytes (for example, 536900000 for ~512 MB). Cloudera also recommends using instances with a minimum of 15 GB of memory for management roles (30 GB recommended).

If the Cloudera Manager username and password are changed directly in Cloudera Manager, Cloudera Director can no longer add new instances or authenticate with Cloudera Manager. Username and password changes must be implemented in Cloudera Director as well.

Workaround: Use the Cloudera Director UI to update the Cloudera Manager username and password.

Modifying a cluster in Cloudera Manager after it is bootstrapped does not cause the cluster state to be synchronized with Cloudera Director. Services that have been added or removed in Cloudera Manager do not show up in Cloudera Director when growing the cluster.

Workaround: None.

Cloudera Director Server uses the AWS credentials from a configured Environment, as defined in a client configuration file or through the Cloudera Director UI. If the Environment is not configured with credentials in Cloudera Director, the Cloudera Director server instead uses the AWS credentials that are configured on the instance on which the Cloudera Director server is running. When those credentials differ from the intended ones, EC2 instances may be allocated under unexpected accounts. Ensure that the Cloudera Director server instance is not configured with AWS credentials.

Severity: Medium

Workaround: Ensure that the Cloudera Director Environment has correct values for the keys. Alternatively, use IAM profiles for the Cloudera Director server instance.

Cloudera Director cannot resize the root partition on Centos 6.5 HVM AMIs. This is caused by a bug in the AMIs. For more information, see the CentOS Bug Tracker.

Workaround: None.

Terminating a cluster that is bootstrapping stops ongoing processes but keeps the cluster in the bootstrapping phase.

Severity: Low

Workaround: To transition the cluster to the Terminated phase, terminate the cluster again.

If you include Hive in your clusters and configure the Hive metastore to be installed on MySQL, Cloudera Manager may report, "The Hive Metastore canary failed to create a database." This is caused by a MySQL bug in MySQL 5.6.5 or higher that is exposed when used with the MySQL JDBC driver (used by Cloudera Director) version 5.1.19 or lower. For information on the MySQL bug, see the MySQL bug description.

Workaround: Depending on the driver version installed by Cloudera Director from your platform's software repositories, select an older MySQL version that does not have this bug.