Cluster Hardware

This section describes important hardware architecture considerations for your cluster.

When planning the hardware architecture for the cluster, make sure all hardware meets the node requirements listed in Preparing Each Node.

The architecture of the cluster hardware is an important consideration when planning a deployment. Among the considerations are anticipated data storage and network bandwidth needs, including intermediate data generated when jobs and applications are executed. The type of workload is important: consider whether the planned cluster usage will be CPU-intensive, I/O-intensive, or memory-intensive. Think about how data will be loaded into and out of the cluster, and how much data is likely to be transmitted over the network.

Planning a cluster often involves tuning key ratios, such as:
  • Disk I/O speed to CPU processing power
  • Storage capacity to network speed
  • Number of nodes to network speed

Typically, the CPU is less of a bottleneck than network bandwidth and disk I/O. To the extent possible, network and disk transfer rates should be balanced to meet the anticipated data rates using multiple NICs per node. It is not necessary to bond or trunk the NICs together; MapR is able to take advantage of multiple NICs transparently. Each node should provide raw disks and partitions to MapR, with no RAID or logical volume manager, as MapR takes care of formatting and data protection.

The following example architecture provides specifications for a standard MapR Hadoop compute/storage node for general purposes. This configuration is highly scalable in a typical data center environment. MapR can make effective use of more drives per node than standard Hadoop, so each node should present enough faceplate area to allow a large number of drives.

Standard Compute/Storage Node

  • 2U Rack Server/Chassis
  • Dual CPU socket system board
  • 2x8 core CPU, 32 cores with HT enabled
  • 8x8GB DIMMs, 64GB RAM (DIMM count must be multiple of CPU memory channels)
  • 12x2TB SATA drives
  • 10GbE network interface
  • OS using entire single drive, not shared as data drive

Minimum Cluster Size

All MapR clusters must have a minimum of five data nodes except for MapR Edge. A data node is defined as a node running a FileServer process that is responsible for storing data on behalf of the entire cluster. Having additional nodes deployed with control-only services such as CLDB and ZooKeeper is recommended, but they do not count toward the minimum node total because they do not contribute to the overall availability of data.
NOTE: Dedicated control nodes are not needed on clusters with fewer than 10 data nodes.

To maximize fault tolerance in the design of your cluster, see Example Cluster Designs.

Best Practices

Hardware recommendations and cluster configuration vary by use case. For example, is the application a MapR-DB application? Is the application latency-sensitive?

The following recommendations apply in most cases:
Disk Drives
  • Drives should be JBOD, using single-drive RAID0 volumes to take advantage of the controller cache.
  • SSDs are recommended when using MapR-DB JSON with secondary indexes. HDDs can be used with secondary indexes only if the performance requirements are thoroughly understood. Performance can be substantially impaired on HDDs because of high levels of disordered I/O requests. SSDs are not needed for using MapR-ES.
  • Mixing SSDs and HDDs on the same node is not supported. All drives on a node must be of the same type.
  • SAS drives can provide better I/O latency; SSDs provide even lower latency.
  • Match aggregate drive throughput to network throughput. 10GbE ~= 10-12 drives.
Cluster Size
  • In general, it is better to have more nodes. Larger clusters recover faster from disk failures because more nodes are available to contribute.
  • For smaller clusters, all nodes are likely to fit on a single non-blocking switch. Larger clusters require a well-designed Spine/Leaf fabric that can scale.
Operating System and Server Configuration
  • CentOS or RHEL 7.2, 7.3, or 7.4 are supported, as well as SUSE 12 SP2 and Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04. See Operating System Support Matrix (MapR 6.x).
  • Install the minimal server configuration. Use a product like Cobbler to PXE boot and install a consistent OS image.
  • Install the full JDK (1.8).
  • For best performance, avoid deploying a MapR cluster on virtual machines. However, VMs are supported for use as clients or edge nodes.
Memory, CPUs, Number of Cores
  • Make sure the DIMM count is an exact multiple of the number of memory channels the selected CPU provides.
  • Use CPUs with as many cores as you can. Having more cores is more important than having a slightly higher clock speed.
  • MapR-DB benefits from lots of RAM: 256GB per node or more.