Using an External Database for Cloudera Manager and CDH

By default, Cloudera Director configures Cloudera Manager and CDH services, such as Hive, to use the Cloudera Manager embedded PostgreSQL database. You can use Cloudera Director to configure them to use external database servers, instead, which is recommended for production environments. If you have a database server already configured, you can configure Cloudera Manager and CDH services to create or use databases on that server. You can also configure Cloudera Director to use a cloud provider service such as Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) to provision new database servers.

You can also configure Cloudera Manager and CDH services to use Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, as described in Using EBS Volumes for Cloudera Manager and CDH.

How you set up external database servers and databases differs depending on whether you are using Cloudera Director client or Cloudera Director server:
  • Cloudera Director client - Configure external databases in the cluster.conf file and launch Cloudera Director client (standalone) by issuing the bootstrap command.
  • Cloudera Director server - Configure external databases for Cloudera Director server in one of the following ways:
    • Using the Cloudera Director web UI
    • Using the Cloudera Director REST API
    • By editing the cluster.conf file and launching the Cloudera Director server with the bootstrap-remote command

The topics in this section describe how to use Cloudera Director to define external database servers and external databases.