Configuring OS for Hadoop cluster

As mentioned earlier, Hadoop can run on almost any modern flavor of Linux. Instructions in this, and following chapters, will be focused on CentOS 6.x—CentOS and Red Hat are the most popular choices for production related Hadoop installations. It shouldn't be too hard to adopt these instructions for, let's say Debian, because all things that are directly related to configuring Hadoop components will stay the same and you should be able to substitute package managers for your favorite distributions easily.

Choosing and setting up the filesystem

Modern Linux distributions support different filesystems: EXT3, EXT4, XFS, BTRFS, among others. These filesystems possess slightly different characteristics when it comes to its performance on certain workloads.

If you favor stability over performance and advanced features, you might want to use EXT3, which is battle-tested on some of the largest Hadoop clusters. The complete list can be seen at http://wiki.apache.org...