@Leenurs Quadras Hive installation is independent of NameNode/Secondary NameNode location. In the configuration file you just need to specify where is Hadoop installed so that it can access the job tracker for submitting Map Reduce programs. Theoretically you can setup HiveServer, MetaStore Server, hive clients, etc. all in the Master Node. However in a production scenario placing them in a Master or Slave node is not a good idea. You should set up hiveserver on a dedicated Node so it doesn't compete for resources against the namenode processes (It gets quite busy in a multi-user scenario). MetaStore is a separate daemon which can be either embedded with the HiveServer (in this case it uses derby and isn't ideal for a production use) or can be setup separately as a dedicated database service(the recommended way). Beeline (hive client) can run in embedded mode as well as remotely. Remote HiveServer2 mode is recommended for production use, as it is more secure and doesn't require direct HDFS/metastore access to be granted for users. Hope this answers all your questions. ... View more