Hadoop Summit 2012 - Deployment and Operations track Everyone hears about large clusters with thousands of machines and petabytes of storage yet not everyone starts their first Hadoop deployment with dozens of cabinets of equipment. What do you do when you don`t have quite as large of a deployment? What decisions should you make now and which should you postpone for later? This session is for SysAdmins that have not yet or just recently jumped into the Hadoop fray. You will be presented with the knowledge gained from two years of operational experience at a (currently) small Hadoop site. We will discuss things that are initially important for a small (10-100 node) cluster and what happens when you outgrow your first deployment.

1. APOLLO GROUP
Hadoop Operations: Starting Out Small
So Your Cluster Isn't Yahoo-sized (yet)
Michael Arnold
Principal Systems Engineer
14 June 2012

2. Agenda
Who
What (Definitions)
Decisions for Now
Decisions for Later
Lessons Learned
APOLLO GROUP © 2012 Apollo Group 2

3. APOLLO GROUP
Who
APOLLO GROUP Apollo Group
© 2012 3

4. Who is Apollo?
Apollo Group is a leading provider of higher
education programs for working adults.
APOLLO GROUP © 2012 Apollo Group 4

5. Who is Michael Arnold?
Systems Administrator
Automation geek
13 years in IT
I deal with:
–Server hardware specification/configuration
–Server firmware
–Server operating system
–Hadoop application health
–Monitoring all the above
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6. APOLLO GROUP
What
Definitions
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7. Definitions
Q: What is a tiny/small/medium/large cluster?
A:
–Tiny: 1-9
–Small: 10-99
–Medium: 100-999
–Large: 1000+
–Yahoo-sized: 4000
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8. Definitions
Q: What is a “headnode”?
A: A server that runs one or more of the following
Hadoop processes:
–NameNode
–JobTracker
–Secondary NameNode
–ZooKeeper
–HBase Master
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9. APOLLO GROUP
What decisions should you
make now and which can
you postpone for later?
Decisions for Now
APOLLO GROUP Apollo Group
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10. Which Hadoop distribution?
Amazon
Apache
Cloudera
Greenplum
Hortonworks
IBM
MapR
Platform Computing
APOLLO GROUP © 2012 Apollo Group 10

11. Should you virtualize?
Can be OK for small clusters BUT
–virtualization adds overhead
–can cause performance degradation
–cannot take advantage of Hadoop rack locality
Virtualization can be good for:
–functional testing of M/R job or workflow changes
–evaluation of Hadoop upgrades
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12. What sort of hardware should you be
considering?
Inexpensive
Not “enterprisey” hardware
–No RAID*
–No Redundant power*
Low power consumption
No optical drives
–get systems that can boot off the network
* except in headnodes
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13. Plan for capacity expansion
Start at the bottom and
work your way up
Leave room in your
cabinets for more
machines
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14. Plan for capacity expansion (cont.)
Deploy your initial
cluster in two cabinets
–One headnode, one
switch, and several
(five) datanodes per
cabinet
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15. Plan for capacity expansion (cont.)
Install a second cluster
in the empty space in
the upper half of the
cabinet
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16. APOLLO GROUP
What decisions should you
make now and which can
you postpone for later?
Decisions for Later
APOLLO GROUP Apollo Group
© 2012 16

17. What size cluster?
Depends upon your:
Budget
Data size
Workload characteristics
SLA
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18. What size cluster? (cont.)
Are your MapReduce jobs:
compute-intensive?
reading lots of data?
http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2010/08/hadoophbase-capacity-planning/
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19. Should you implement rack awareness?
If more than one switch in the cluster:
YES
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20. Should you use automation?
If not in the beginning, then as soon as
possible.
Boot disks will fail.
Automated OS and application installs:
–Save time
–Reduce errors
•Cobbler/Spacewalk/Foreman/xCat/etc
•Puppet/Chef/Cfengine/shell scripts/etc
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21. APOLLO GROUP
Lessons Learned
APOLLO GROUP Apollo Group
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22. Keep It Simple
Don't add redundancy and features
(server/network) that will make things more
complicated and expensive.
Hadoop has built-in redundancies.
Don't overlook them.
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23. Automate the Hardware
Twelve hours of manual work in the datacenter is
not fun.
Make sure all server firmware is configured
identically.
–HP SmartStart Scripting Toolkit
–Dell OpenManage Deployment Toolkit
–IBM ServerGuide Scripting Toolkit
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24. Rolling upgrades are possible
(Just not of the Hadoop software.)
Datanodes can be decommissioned, patched, and
added back into the cluster without service
downtime.
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25. The smallest thing can have a big impact on the
cluster
Bad NIC/switchport can cause cluster slowness.
Slow disks can cause intermittent job slowdowns.
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26. HDFS blocks are weird
On ext3/ext4:
–Small blocks are not padded to the HDFS block-
size, but rather the actual size of the data.
–Each HDFS block is actually two files on the
datanode's filesystem:
•The actual data and
•A metadata/checksum file
# ls -l blk_1058778885645824207*
-rw-r--r-- 1 hdfs hdfs 35094 May 14 01:26 blk_1058778885645824207
-rw-r--r-- 1 hdfs hdfs 283 May 14 01:26 blk_1058778885645824207_19155994.meta
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27. Do not prematurely optimize
Be careful tuning your datanode filesystems.
• mkfs -t ext4 -T largefile4 ... (probably bad)
• mkfs -t ext4 -i 131072 -m 0 ... (better)
/etc/mke2fs.conf
[fs_types]
hadoop = {
features = has_journal,extent,huge_file,flex_bg,uninit_bg,dir_nlink,
extra_isize
inode_ratio = 131072
blocksize = -1
reserved_ratio = 0
default_mntopts = acl,user_xattr
}
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28. Use DNS-friendly names for services
hdfs://hdfs.delta.hadoop.apollogrp.edu:8020/
mapred.delta.hadoop.apollogrp.edu:8021
http://oozie.delta.hadoop.apollogrp.edu:11000/
hiveserver.delta.hadoop.apollogrp.edu:10000
Yes, the names are long, but I bet you can figure out how to
connect to Bravo Cluster.
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29. Use a parallel, remote execution tool
pdsh/Cluster SSH/mussh/etc
SSH in a for loop is so 2010
FUNC/MCollective
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30. Make your log directories as large as you can.
20-100GB /var/log
–Implement log purging cronjobs or your log
directories will fill up.
Beware: M/R jobs can fill up /tmp as well.
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31. Insist on IPMI 2.0 for out of band management of
server hardware.
Serial Over LAN is awesome when booting a
system.
Standardized hardware/temperature monitoring.
Simple remote power control.
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32. Spanning-tree is the devil
Enable portfast on your server switch ports or the
BMCs may never get a DHCP lease.
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33. Apollo has re-built it's cluster four times.
You may end up doing so as well.
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34. Apollo Timeline
First build
Cloudera Professional Services helped install CDH
Four nodes
Manually build OS via USB CDROM.
CDH2
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35. Apollo Timeline
Second build
Cobbler
All software deployment is via kickstart. Very little
is in puppet. Config files are deployed via wget.
CDH2
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36. Apollo Timeline
Third build
OS filesystem partitioning needed to change.
Most software deployment still via kickstart.
CDH3b2
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37. Apollo Timeline
Fourth build
HDFS filesystem inodes needed to be increased.
Full puppet automation.
Added redundant/hotswap enterprise hardware for
headnodes.
CDH3u1
APOLLO GROUP © 2012 Apollo Group 39

38. Cluster failures at Apollo
Hardware
–disk failures (40+)
–disk cabling (6)
–RAM (2)
–switch port (1)
Software
–Cluster
•NFS (NN -> 2NN metadata)
–Job
•TT java heap
•Running out of /tmp or /var/log/hadoop
•Running out of HDFS space
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39. Know your workload
You can spend all the time in the world trying to get
the best CPU/RAM/HDD/switch/cabinet
configuration, but you are running on pure luck
until you understand your cluster's workload.
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40. APOLLO GROUP
Questions?
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