Tuning the disk

In this recipe, we will tune the disk drives to give the optimal performance. For I/O bound workloads like sorting, indexing, data movement disks, and network play an important role and need to be addressed in the right manner.

The workload conditions on a Datanode will be different from that of a Namenode or that of a database running a MySQL metastore. The changes mentioned in the following recipe are valid for all nodes, unless explicitly mentioned otherwise.

Getting ready

To step through the recipe in this section, we need at least one node to test and to make the configuration first, and the same can be applied to nodes within the same categories of master nodes or Datanodes. It is recommended to read Chapter 10, Cluster Planning, to get an idea about the cluster layout.

How to do it...

1. Connect to a node which at a later stage will be used to install Hadoop. We are using the node, master1.cyrus.com.

2. Switch to root user or have sudo privileges.

3. Make sure that you have different...