HBase upgrade

In this recipe, we will cover how to upgrade to the latest stable release, which at the time of writing this recipe is version 1.2.5.

In any organization, it is important to keep it patched and updated to the latest release to address any bug fixes and issues.

But upgrading is not always that easy, as it may involve downtime and one version might not support the old metadata structure. An example of this is the old Hfile v1 format.

Getting ready

For this recipe, make sure you have an HBase cluster running and that you understand the regions and its communication.

How to do it...

1. Connect to the master1.cyrus.com master node and switch to the user hadoop.
2. Before performing any upgrades, it is important to verify that we have backup in place and that the cluster is in a consistent state.
3. Download the latest HBase release, as we did initially and update the symlink to point to the new version, as shown here:

   $ unlink hbase
   $ ln –s hbase-1.2.5-bin hbase
   

4. Do the same on all the nodes...