Standalone and distributed modes

Standalone mode installation (No dependency on Hadoop system)

• This is default mode of HBase
• It runs against local file system
• It doesn’t use Hadoop HDFS
• Only HMaster daemon can run
• Not recommended for production environment
• Runs in single JVM

Pseudo-Distributed mode installation (Single node Hadoop system + HBase installation)

• It runs on Hadoop HDFS
• All Daemons run in single node
• Recommend for production environment

Fully Distributed mode installation (MultinodeHadoop environment + HBase installation)

• It runs on Hadoop HDFS
• All daemons going to run across all nodes present in the cluster
• Highly recommended for production environment

In standalone mode, HBase does not use HDFS — it uses the local filesystem instead — and it runs all HBase daemons and a local ZooKeeper all up in the same JVM. Zookeeper binds to a well known port so clients may talk to HBase.

A pseudo-distributed mode is simply a fully-distributed mode run on a single host. Use this configuration testing and prototyping on HBase. Do not use this configuration for production nor for evaluating HBase performance.

By default, HBase runs in standalone mode. Both standalone mode and pseudo-distributed mode are provided for the purposes of small-scale testing. For a production environment, distributed mode is appropriate. In distributed mode, multiple instances of HBase daemons run on multiple servers in the cluster.

Just as in pseudo-distributed mode, a fully distributed configuration requires that you set the hbase-cluster.distributed property to true. Typically, the hbase.rootdir is configured to point to a highly-available HDFS filesystem.

Distributed RegionServers. Typically, your cluster will contain multiple RegionServers all running on different servers, as well as primary and backup Master and Zookeeper daemons. The conf/regionservers file on the master server contains a list of hosts whose RegionServers are associated with this cluster. Each host is on a separate line. All hosts listed in this file will have their RegionServer processes started and stopped when the master server starts or stops.