Rolling Restart

Minimum Required Role: Operator (also provided by Configurator, Cluster Administrator, Full Administrator)

Rolling restart allows you to conditionally restart the role instances of Flume, HBase, HDFS, Kafka, MapReduce, YARN, and ZooKeeper services to update software or use a new configuration. If the service is not running, rolling restart is not available for that service. You can do a rolling restart of each service individually.

If you have HDFS high availability enabled, you can also perform a cluster-level rolling restart. At the cluster level, the rolling restart of worker hosts is performed on a host-by-host basis, rather than per service, to avoid all roles for a service potentially being unavailable at the same time. During a cluster restart, to avoid having your NameNode (and thus the cluster) be unavailable during the restart, Cloudera Manager forces a failover to the standby NameNode.

MapReduce (MRv1) JobTracker High Availability and YARN (MRv2) ResourceManager High Availability is not required for a cluster-level rolling restart. However, if you have JobTracker or ResourceManager high availability enabled, Cloudera Manager will force a failover to the standby JobTracker or ResourceManager.

Performing a Service or Role Rolling Restart

You can initiate a rolling restart from either the Status page for one of the eligible services, or from the service's Instances page, where you can select individual roles to be restarted.

  1. Go to the service you want to restart.
  2. Do one of the following:
    • service - Select Actions > Rolling Restart.
    • role -
      1. Click the Instances tab.
      2. Select the roles to restart.
      3. Select Actions for Selected > Rolling Restart.
  3. In the pop-up dialog box, select the options you want:
    • Restart only roles whose configurations are stale
    • Restart only roles that are running outdated software versions
    • Which role types to restart
  4. If you select an HDFS, HBase, MapReduce, or YARN service, you can have their worker roles restarted in batches. You can configure:
    • How many roles should be included in a batch - Cloudera Manager restarts the worker roles rack-by-rack in alphabetical order, and within each rack, hosts are restarted in alphabetical order. If you are using the default replication factor of 3, Hadoop tries to keep the replicas on at least 2 different racks. So if you have multiple racks, you can use a higher batch size than the default 1. But you should be aware that using too high batch size also means that fewer worker roles are active at any time during the upgrade, so it can cause temporary performance degradation. If you are using a single rack only, you should only restart one worker node at a time to ensure data availability during upgrade.
    • How long should Cloudera Manager wait before starting the next batch.
    • The number of batch failures that will cause the entire rolling restart to fail (this is an advanced feature). For example if you have a very large cluster you can use this option to allow failures because if you know that your cluster will be functional even if some worker roles are down.
  5. Click Confirm to start the rolling restart.

Performing a Cluster-Level Rolling Restart

You can perform a cluster-level rolling restart on demand from the Cloudera Manager Admin Console. A cluster-level rolling restart is also performed as the last step in a rolling upgrade when the cluster is configured with HDFS high availability enabled.

  1. If you have not already done so, enable high availability. See HDFS High Availability for instructions. You do not need to enable automatic failover for rolling restart to work, though you can enable it if you want. Automatic failover does not affect the rolling restart operation.
  2. For the cluster you want to restart select Actions > Rolling Restart.
  3. In the pop-up dialog box, select the services you want to restart. Please review the caveats in the preceding section for the services you elect to have restarted. The services that do not support rolling restart will simply be restarted, and will be unavailable during their restart.
  4. If you select an HDFS, HBase, or MapReduce service, you can have their worker roles restarted in batches. You can configure:
    • How many roles should be included in a batch - Cloudera Manager restarts the worker roles rack-by-rack in alphabetical order, and within each rack, hosts are restarted in alphabetical order. If you are using the default replication factor of 3, Hadoop tries to keep the replicas on at least 2 different racks. So if you have multiple racks, you can use a higher batch size than the default 1. But you should be aware that using too high batch size also means that fewer worker roles are active at any time during the upgrade, so it can cause temporary performance degradation. If you are using a single rack only, you should only restart one worker node at a time to ensure data availability during upgrade.
    • How long should Cloudera Manager wait before starting the next batch.
    • The number of batch failures that will cause the entire rolling restart to fail (this is an advanced feature). For example if you have a very large cluster you can use this option to allow failures because if you know that your cluster will be functional even if some worker roles are down.
  5. Click Restart to start the rolling restart. While the restart is in progress, the Command Details page shows the steps for stopping and restarting the services.