Enhancement of Hadoop Clusters with Virtualization Using the Capacity Scheduler

Abstract

We present a virtualized setup of a Hadoop cluster that provides greater computing capacity with lesser resources, since a virtualized cluster requires fewer physical machines. The master node of the cluster is set up on a physical machine, and slave nodes are set up on virtual machines (VMs) that may be on a common physical machine. Hadoop configured VM images are created by cloning of VMs, which facilitates fast addition and deletion of nodes in the cluster without much overhead. Also, we have configured the Hadoop virtualized cluster to use capacity scheduler instead of the default FIFO scheduler. The capacity scheduler schedules tasks based on the availability of RAM and virtual memory (VMEM) in slave nodes before allocating any job. So instead of queuing up the jobs, they are efficiently allocated on the VMs based on the memory available. Various configuration parameters of Hadoop are analyzed and the virtualized cluster is fine-tuned to ensure best performance and maximum scalability.