HDP Support for mix of OS Releases within a cluster

[#1]

Can HDP support clusters which have a mix of Operating System releases? For example can it support the following scenario:

• Some nodes in the cluster running RHEL 6.4
• Some nodes in the cluster running RHEL 7.0
• (Assuming this example is running HDP 2.3)

Or do we need to limit the cluster to using OS's of the same release. E.g. all nodes should run same major and minor OS release?

I'm assuming we must use OS's of the same Product family, such as all RHEL, all CentOS, or all SUSE, etc.

Thanks!

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Wes, I would venture to guess this is possible though obviously adds complexity. You'll want to pay close attention to versions of java, yum, python, etc on each node. You may have to utilize virtualenv for specific services to force it use specific versions of these pre-req components. For example, RHEL 7 ships with a python version incompatible with our version of HUE.

[#3]

@Scott Shaw

Can we add RHEL 6.6 server external client to a SUSE Linux HDP Cluster , if so what versions of SUSE and RHEL are compatible ?

This is error i got when I try to add. Thanks in advance!

raise Exception("Local OS is not compatible with cluster primary OS family. Please perform manual bootstrap on this host.")

Exception: Local OS is not compatible with cluster primary OS family. Please perform manual bootstrap on this host.

[#4]

Wes, this is supported. As @Scott Shaw mentioned, may not always be the easiest choice for operators, but if they are asking such a question, usually it just has to be done.

[#5]

I have a cluster that is running on RHEL7. I got an extra host that i would like to add to the cluster, this host is running RHEL6 instead. when I try add it to the cluster via ambari I get the error

"Local OS is not compatible with cluster primary OS family. Please perform manual bootstrap on this host."

I tried installing ambari-agent manually on the RHEL6 machine, edited the ambari-agent.ini file with the right ambari host and restarted the agent.

in ambari-server log I can see this error

"Host xxx.xxx.com re-registered, will not be added to the available hosts list"

Any idea how to pass the OS check on ambari server?

[#6]

/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/ambari_server/os_type_check.sh is the script that Ambari uses to check OS version. After disabling this script, I was able to register the RHEl6 machine to the cluster through Ambari. I also installed all the HDP clients to this node (still have some issues with RPMs management) and was able to run HIVE and Hadoop commands.

Note: my cluster is not kerberized yet, probably more interesting issues will come up when i try to enable kerberos 🙂

[#7]

@Wes Floyd @Scott Shaw I just had a talk with HDP and Ambari PM's and they recommended that you don't mix OS's between major releases (e.g. RHEL 6.X and RHEL 7.X).

They did state some people do mix Family OS's in the same major release (e.g. RHEL 7.X and CentOS 7.X) but while less likely, even that could lead to issues as it isn't tested.

[#8]

@Wael Emam

Its never recommended to have different OS for same host in cluster. If you still manage to bypass this for ambari agent install you will still face issue while deploying services and running applications on the host.

Better is to re-install and use same version of OS.

Still you can check - https://community.hortonworks.com/questions/18479/how-to-register-host-with-different-os-to-ambari.h...