Namenode HA Switchover

Issue is happening in Hortonworks platteform.

@Vinay1991 

Unfortunately, you haven't described your cluster setup but my assumption is that you have 3 Zk's in your HA implementation. There are two components deployed to Hadoop HDFS for implementing Automatic Failover.

These two components are-

• ZKFailoverController process(ZKFC)
• ZooKeeper quorum (3 Zk's)

1. ZKFailoverController(ZKFC)
The ZKFC is the ZooKeeper client, who is also responsible for managing and monitoring the NameNode state. ZKFC is a client that runs on all nodes on the Hadoop cluster, which is running NameNode.

These 2 components are responsible for:

Health monitoring
ZKFC is accountable for health monitoring heart beating the NameNode with health-check commands periodically. As long as the NameNode responds with a healthy status timely, it considers the NameNode as healthy. In this case, if the NameNode got crashed, froze, or entered an unhealthy state, then it marks the NameNode as unhealthy.

ZooKeeper session management
It is also responsible for the session management with ZooKeeper. The ZKFC maintains a session open in the ZooKeeper when the local Namenode is healthy. Also, if the Local NameNode is the active NameNode, then with the session, it also holds a special lock “znode”. This lock uses ZooKeeper support for the ”ephemeral” nodes. Thus, if the session gets expires, the lock node will be deleted automatically.

ZooKeeper-based election

When the local Namenode is healthy and ZKFC finds that no other NameNode acquires the lock “znode”, then it will try by itself to acquire the lock. If it gets successful in obtaining the lock, then ZKFC has won the election, and now it is responsible for running the failover to make its local NameNode active. The failover process run by the ZKFC is similar to the failover process run by the manual failover described in the NameNode High Availability article.

2. ZooKeeper quorum
A ZK quorum is a highly available service for maintaining little amounts of coordination data. It notifies the clients about the changes in that data. It monitors clients for the failures.
The HDFS implementation of automatic failover depends on ZooKeeper for the following things:

How does it detect NN Failure each NameNode machine in the Hadoop cluster maintains a persistent session in the ZooKeeper. If any of the machines crashes, then the ZooKeeper session maintained will get expire—zooKeeper than reveal to all the other NameNodes to start the failover process.

To exclusively select the active NameNode, ZooKeeper provides a simple mechanism. In the case of active NameNode failure, another standby NameNode may take the special exclusive lock in the ZooKeeper, stating that it should become the next active NameNode.

• After the initialization of Health Monitor is completed, internal threads are started to call the method corresponding to the HASERVICE Protocol RPC interface of NameNode periodically to detect the health status of NameNode.
• If the Health Monitor detects a change in the health status of NameNode, it calls back the corresponding method registered by ZKFailover Controller for processing.
• If ZKFailover Controller decides that a primary-standby switch is needed, it will first use
• Active Standby Elector to conduct an automatic primary election.
• Active Standby Elector interacts with Zookeeper to complete an automatic backup election.
• Active Standby Elector calls back the corresponding method of ZKFailover Controller to notify the current NameNode to become the main NameNode or the standby NameNode after the primary election is completed.
• ZKFailover Controller calls the HASERVICE Protocol RPC interface corresponding to NameNode to convert NameNode to Active or Standby state.

Taking all the above into account, the first component logs to check are Zk and NN,

/var/log/hadoop/hdfs
/var/log/zookeeper

My suspicion is you have issues with the Namenode heartbeat which makes the zookeeper fail to get the pingback in time and marks the NN as dead and elects a new leader and that keeps happening in a loop. So check those ZK logs to ensure time is set correctly and is in sync!

Please revert

@Vinay1991 
I mentioned the logs below.You will need definitely the ZK ZKFailoverController logs and NameNode logs