Cloudera Docs

Decommissioning or permanently removing a tablet server from a cluster

Kudu does not currently support an automated way to remove a tablet server from a cluster permanently. Use the following steps to manually remove a tablet server:

  1. Ensure the cluster is in good health using ksck.
  2. If the tablet server contains any replicas of tables with replication factor 1, these replicas must be manually moved off the tablet server prior to shutting it down. Use the kudu tablet change_config move_replica tool for this.
  3. Shut down the tablet server. After -follower_unavailable_considered_failed_sec, which defaults to 5 minutes, Kudu will begin to re-replicate the tablet server’s replicas to other servers. Wait until the process is finished. Progress can be monitored using ksck.
  4. Once all the copies are complete, ksck will continue to report the tablet server as unavailable. The cluster will otherwise operate fine without the tablet server. To completely remove it from the cluster so ksck shows the cluster as completely healthy, restart the masters. In the case of a single master, this will cause cluster downtime. With multi-master, restart the masters in sequence to avoid cluster downtime.