We will describe how to stop a region server gracefully in this recipe.
It is possible to simply invoke the following command to stop the RegionServer daemon on a region server:
hadoop@slave1$ $HBASE_HOME/bin/hbase-daemon.sh stop regionserver
However, this approach has the disadvantage that regions deployed on the stopped region server will go offline for a while during the stopping process. In production, especially for clusters handling online requests, it is expected to gracefully stop a region server to minimize the region's offline time.
We will describe how HBase supports its graceful node decommissioning feature in this recipe.
Start your HBase cluster and log into the master node as the user (the hadoop
user in our demonstration) who starts the cluster.