Running a tablet rebalancing tool on a rack-aware cluster

It is possible to use the kudu cluster rebalance tool to establish the placement policy on a cluster. This might be necessary when the rack awareness feature is first configured or when re-replication violated the placement policy.

The rebalancing tool breaks its work into three phases:

The rack-aware rebalancer tries to establish the placement policy. Use the ‑‑disable_policy_fixer flag to skip this phase.
The rebalancer tries to balance load by location, moving tablet replicas between locations in an attempt to spread tablet replicas among locations evenly. The load of a location is measured as the total number of replicas in the location divided by the number of tablet servers in the location. Use the ‑‑disable_cross_location_rebalancing flag to skip this phase.
The rebalancer tries to balance the tablet replica distribution within each location, as if the location were a cluster on its own. Use the ‑‑disable_intra_location_rebalancing flag to skip this phase.

By using the ‑‑report_only flag, it’s also possible to check if all tablets in the cluster conform to the placement policy without attempting any replica movement.