YARN HA Solution

HA Principles and Implementation Solution

ResourceManager in YARN manages resources and schedules tasks in the cluster. In versions earlier than Hadoop 2.4, SPOFs may occur on ResourceManager in the YARN cluster. The YARN HA solution uses redundant ResourceManager nodes to tackle challenges of service reliability and fault tolerance.

Figure 1 ResourceManager HA architecture

ResourceManager HA is achieved using active-standby ResourceManager nodes, as shown in Figure 1. Similar to the HDFS HA solution, the ResourceManager HA allows only one ResourceManager node to be in the active state at any time. When the active ResourceManager fails, the active-standby switchover can be triggered automatically or manually.

When the automatic failover function is not enabled, after the YARN cluster is enabled, MRS cluster administrators need to run the yarn rmadmin command to manually switch one of the ResourceManager nodes to the active state. Upon a planned maintenance event or a fault, they are expected to first demote the active ResourceManager to the standby state and the standby ResourceManager promote to the active state.

When automatic failover is enabled, a built-in ActiveStandbyElector that is based on ZooKeeper is used to decide which ResourceManager node should be the active one. When the active ResourceManager is faulty, another ResourceManager node is automatically selected to be the active one to take over the faulty node.

When ResourceManager nodes in the cluster are deployed in HA mode, the configuration yarn-site.xml used by clients needs to list all the ResourceManager nodes. The client (including ApplicationMaster and NodeManager) searches for the active ResourceManager in polling mode. That is, the client needs to provide the fault tolerance mechanism. If the active ResourceManager cannot be connected with, the client continuously searches for a new one in polling mode.

After the standby ResourceManager node becomes the active one, the upper-layer applications can recover to their status when the fault occurs. For details, see ResourceManager Restart. When ResourceManager Restart is enabled, the restarted ResourceManager node loads the information of the previous active ResourceManager node, and takes over container status information on all NodeManager nodes to continue service running. In this way, status information can be saved by periodically executing checkpoint operations, avoiding data loss. Ensure that both active and standby ResourceManager nodes can access the status information. Currently, three methods are provided for sharing status information by file system (FileSystemRMStateStore), LevelDB database (LeveldbRMStateStore), and ZooKeeper (ZKRMStateStore). Among them, only ZKRMStateStore supports the Fencing mechanism. By default, Hadoop uses ZKRMStateStore.