Configuring Hardware for HDFS HA

In order to deploy an HA cluster using Quorum-based Storage, you should prepare the following:
  • NameNode machines - the machines on which you run the Active and Standby NameNodes should have equivalent hardware to each other, and equivalent hardware to what would be used in a non-HA cluster.
  • JournalNode machines - the machines on which you run the JournalNodes.
    • Cloudera recommends that you deploy the JournalNode daemons on the "master" host or hosts (NameNode, Standby NameNode, JobTracker, and so on) so the JournalNodes' local directories can use the reliable local storage on those machines. Each JournalNode process should preferably have its own dedicated disk. You should not use SAN or NAS storage for these directories.
  • There must be at least three JournalNode daemons, since edit log modifications must be written to a majority of JournalNodes. This will allow the system to tolerate the failure of a single machine. You can also run more than three JournalNodes, but in order to actually increase the number of failures the system can tolerate, you should run an odd number of JournalNodes, (three, five, seven, and so on). Note that when running with N JournalNodes, the system can tolerate at most (N - 1) / 2 failures and continue to function normally. If the requisite quorum is not available, the NameNode will not format or start, and you will see an error similar to this:
12/10/01 17:34:18 WARN namenode.FSEditLog: Unable to determine input streams from QJM to [10.0.1.10:8485, 10.0.1.10:8486, 10.0.1.10:8487]. Skipping.
java.io.IOException: Timed out waiting 20000ms for a quorum of nodes to respond.