In this chapter, we discussed components of HBase and its subcomponents. We also discussed various initial configurations related to the network, OS, and so on, which are good to configure at the beginning for better operation and performance of an HBase cluster. As per the system requirements, we can say that we will have a Hadoop cluster running, where NameNode will have more memory to hold metadata, average processing power, and storage. These are not really required by NameNode because it serves requests, and all the other operations such as read/write and processing take place at the slave nodes. For the slave nodes, we need to have more memory in memory files—more dedicated storage defines the storage capacity of a node, and hence the cluster, and it also means a high processing time because the real processing takes place on these machines.

We also discussed the prerequisites and basic requirements before building up. In the next chapter, we will start building the cluster, and will discuss advance and configuration parameters. We will start building the Hadoop and HBase clusters and also learn how to build a live cluster that can run in different modes.