Running the balancer in Cloudera Hadoop

I just started to play with Cloudera Manager 5.0.1 and a small fresh setup cluster. It has six datanodes with a total capacity of 16.84 TB, one Namenode and another node for the Cloudera Manager and other S Ervices. From start on, I is wondering how to start the HDFS balancer.

Short answer:

To run the balancer your need to add the balancer role to any node in you cluster!

I'll show you the few simple steps (I assume are a cluster with CDH >= 4.3.0 up and running WI Th at least the HDFS service).

Login to the Cloudera Manager

Select the service "HDFS" from the Cluster-to enable the Balancer

Select the "Instances" tab, set the checkbox for the node of you like to add the Balancer role (I selected the NameNode host) and click "Add"

Add the role "Balancer" to this node

Click "Continue" to add the role.

That ' s it! No need to restart, no need to change anything else!

Now your can run the balancer from the ' Actions ' menu available in the HDFS service on th top right corner.

For additional information refer to the official Adding Role Instances Guide and the Guide forrunning the Balancer.