Treat your Hadoop nodes like cattle

I’ve built compute clusters of various sizes, from hundreds to tens of thousands of systems, for almost two decades now.  One of the things I learned early on is that, for compute clusters, you want to treat each system as cookie cutter as possible.  By that, I mean there should be a minimal set of differences […]

Using cobbler with a fast file system creation snippet for Kickstart %post install of Hadoop nodes

I run Hadoop servers with 12 2TB hard drives in them. One of the bottlenecks with this occurs during kickstart when we’re using anaconda to create the filesystems. Previously, I just had a specific partition configuration that was brought in during %pre, but this caused the filesystem formatting section of kickstart to take several hours […]