Frequently Asked Questions

This page answers frequently asked questions about Altus Director.

General Questions

Can I move Altus Director to a different instance?

In some circumstances, you might want to move Altus Director from the instance where it is installed to a different instance. This can be done much as it would be with any other application. One straightforward procedure is to snapshot or image the current instance and deploy a new instance from it.

Cloudera recommends that you take a backup of the database before the migration to be safe. If you are using the H2 embedded database (which is not recommended for production deployments), it resides on the file system, so a snapshot or image will include it. If you are using MySQL to host the Altus Director database, then the database resides elsewhere on a database server. Backing up the Altus Director database in either case is an extra precaution, but isn't strictly necessary in order to move Altus Director over to the new instance.

Can master or worker roles be run on instances where Cloudera Manager is running?

No, CDH cluster entities cannot be run on the same instance as Cloudera Manager.

How can I reduce the time required for cluster deployment?

You can reduce cluster deployment time by using an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). For information on creating an AMI, see Using Custom Repositories with Cloudera Manager and CDH.

How can I make Altus Director highly available?

Altus Director can set up highly available clusters in a Cloudera Manager deployment, but does not support a high availability setup for itself. You can make Altus Director more robust by configuring it to use a backed-up, robust MySQL database server (one that is hosted, for example, on AWS RDS ) for its database instead of Altus Director's default H2 database. Then, if the Director instance goes down, another instance can be spun up that references the same database. In this case, Altus Director has the ability to resume interrupted work.

For information on setting up highly available clusters in a Cloudera Manager deployment using Altus Director, see Creating Highly Available Clusters With Altus Director.

How do I create instances in multiple availability zones in AWS EC2?

This is AWS-specific. Each subnet exists in only one availability zone, so if you want multiple availability zones for your instances, you need to create multiple instance groups, with each one having a template that points to a different subnet.

How can I find a list of available AMIs?

Perform the following steps to generate a list of RHEL 64-bit images:
  1. Install the AWS CLI. 
    $ sudo pip install awscli
  2. Configure the AWS CLI. 
    $ aws configure

    Follow the prompts. Choose any output format. The following example command defines table as the format.

  3. Run the following query: 
    aws ec2 describe-images \
  --output table \
  --query 'Images[*].[VirtualizationType,Name,ImageId]' \
  --owners 309956199498 \
  --filters \
    Name=root-device-type,Values=ebs \
    Name=image-type,Values=machine \
    Name=is-public,Values=true \
    Name=hypervisor,Values=xen \
    Name=architecture,Values=x86_64

    AWS returns a table of available images in the region you configured.