Description:

VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) can be used to protect virtual machines that run vulnerable components of a Hadoop cluster with only a small impact on application performance. A cluster of 24 hosts was used to run three applications characterized by different storage patterns. Various Hadoop configurations were employed to artificially create greater load on the NameNode and JobTracker daemons. With conservative extrapolation, these tests show that uniprocessor virtual machines with FT enabled are sufficient to run the master daemons for clusters of more than 200 hosts.