Storm USES Zookeeper for COORDINATING the cluster. Zookeeper is not used for message passing, so the load that Storm places on Zookeeper is quite LOW. Single NODE Zookeeper clusters should be sufficient for most cases, but if you want failover or are deploying large Storm clusters you may want larger Zookeeper clusters. Instructions for deploying Zookeeper are here.

A few notes about Zookeeper deployment :

It’s critical that you run Zookeeper under supervision, since Zookeeper is fail-fast and will exit the process if it encounters any error case. See here for more details.

It’s critical that you set up a cron to compact Zookeeper’s data and transaction logs. The Zookeeper daemon does not do this on its own, and if you don’t set up a cron, Zookeeper will quickly run out of disk space.

Storm uses Zookeeper for coordinating the cluster. Zookeeper is not used for message passing, so the load that Storm places on Zookeeper is quite low. Single node Zookeeper clusters should be sufficient for most cases, but if you want failover or are deploying large Storm clusters you may want larger Zookeeper clusters. Instructions for deploying Zookeeper are here.

A few notes about Zookeeper deployment :

It’s critical that you run Zookeeper under supervision, since Zookeeper is fail-fast and will exit the process if it encounters any error case. See here for more details.

It’s critical that you set up a cron to compact Zookeeper’s data and transaction logs. The Zookeeper daemon does not do this on its own, and if you don’t set up a cron, Zookeeper will quickly run out of disk space.