Hbase node decommission

You can stop an individual region server by running the following script in the HBase directory on the particular node:

$ ./bin/hbase-daemon.sh stop regionserver

The region server will first close all regions and then shut itself down. On shutdown, the region server's ephemeral node in ZooKeeper will expire. The master will notice the RegionServer gone and will treat it as a crashed server: it will reassign the regions the server was carrying.

Disabling the Load Balancer before Decommissioning a Node

If the load balancer runs while a node is shutting down, then there could be contention between the Load Balancer and the master's recovery of the just decommissioned region server. Avoid any problems by disabling the balancer first: use the shell to disable the balancer like so:

hbase(main):001:0> balance_switch false
true
0