Hbase Node Management

Node Decommission
You can stop an individual RegionServer by running the following script in the HBase directory on the particular node:

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

The RegionServer will first close all regions and then shut itself down. On shutdown, the RegionServer'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 nodes the RegionServer was carrying.

Disable 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 RegionServer. Avoid any problems by disabling the balancer first. See Load Balancer below.

A downside to the above stop of a RegionServer is that regions could be offline for a good period of time. Regions are closed in order. If many regions on the server, the first region to close may not be back online until all regions close and after the master notices the RegionServer's znode gone. In HBase 0.90.2, we added facility for having a node gradually shed its load and then shutdown itself down. HBase 0.90.2 added the graceful_stop.sh script. Here is its usage:

$ ./bin/graceful_stop.sh 

Usage: graceful_stop.sh [--config &conf-dir>] [--restart] [--reload] [--thrift] [--rest] &hostname>
 thrift      If we should stop/start thrift before/after the hbase stop/start
 rest        If we should stop/start rest before/after the hbase stop/start
 restart     If we should restart after graceful stop
 reload      Move offloaded regions back on to the stopped server
 debug       Move offloaded regions back on to the stopped server
 hostname    Hostname of server we are to stop
To decommission a loaded RegionServer, run the following:

$ ./bin/graceful_stop.sh HOSTNAME

where HOSTNAME is the host carrying the RegionServer you would decommission.

On HOSTNAME
The HOSTNAME passed to graceful_stop.sh must match the hostname that hbase is using to identify RegionServers. Check the list of RegionServers in the master UI for how HBase is referring to servers. Its usually hostname but can also be FQDN. Whatever HBase is using, this is what you should pass the graceful_stop.sh decommission script. If you pass IPs, the script is not yet smart enough to make a hostname (or FQDN) of it and so it will fail when it checks if server is currently running; the graceful unloading of regions will not run.

The graceful_stop.sh script will move the regions off the decommissioned RegionServer one at a time to minimize region churn. It will verify the region deployed in the new location before it will moves the next region and so on until the decommissioned server is carrying zero regions. At this point, the graceful_stop.sh tells the RegionServer stop. The master will at this point notice the RegionServer gone but all regions will have already been redeployed and because the RegionServer went down cleanly, there will be no WAL logs to split.

Load Balancer
It is assumed that the Region Load Balancer is disabled while the graceful_stop script runs (otherwise the balancer and the decommission script will end up fighting over region deployments). Use the shell to disable the balancer:

hbase(main):001:0> balance_switch false
true
0 row(s) in 0.3590 seconds
This turns the balancer OFF. To reenable, do:

hbase(main):001:0> balance_switch true
false
0 row(s) in 0.3590 seconds
14.3.2. Rolling Restart
You can also ask this script to restart a RegionServer after the shutdown AND move its old regions back into place. The latter you might do to retain data locality. A primitive rolling restart might be effected by running something like the following:

$ for i in `cat conf/regionservers|sort`; do ./bin/graceful_stop.sh --restart --reload --debug $i; done &> /tmp/log.txt &
            
Tail the output of /tmp/log.txt to follow the scripts progress. The above does RegionServers only. Be sure to disable the load balancer before doing the above. You'd need to do the master update separately. Do it before you run the above script. Here is a pseudo-script for how you might craft a rolling restart script:

Untar your release, make sure of its configuration and then rsync it across the cluster. If this is 0.90.2, patch it with HBASE-3744 and HBASE-3756.

Run hbck to ensure the cluster consistent

$ ./bin/hbase hbck
Effect repairs if inconsistent.

Restart the Master:

$ ./bin/hbase-daemon.sh stop master; ./bin/hbase-daemon.sh start master
Disable the region balancer:

$ echo "balance_switch false" | ./bin/hbase shell
Run the graceful_stop.sh script per RegionServer. For example:

$ for i in `cat conf/regionservers|sort`; do ./bin/graceful_stop.sh --restart --reload --debug $i; done &> /tmp/log.txt &
            
If you are running thrift or rest servers on the RegionServer, pass --thrift or --rest options (See usage for graceful_stop.sh script).

Restart the Master again. This will clear out dead servers list and reenable the balancer.

Run hbck to ensure the cluster is consistent.

Ref: http://hbase.apache.org/book/node.management.html