It is often recommended to have different clusters for HBase and MapReduce. A better qualification of this is: don't collocate a HBase that serves live requests with a heavy MR workload. OLTP and OLAP-optimized systems have conflicting requirements and one will lose to the other, usually the former. For example, short latency-sensitive disk reads will have to wait in line behind longer reads that are trying to squeeze out as much throughput as possible. MR jobs that write to HBase will also generate flushes and compactions, which will in turn invalidate blocks in the Section 9.6.4, “Block Cache”.

If you need to process the data from your live HBase cluster in MR, you can ship the deltas with ??? or use replication to get the new data in real time on the OLAP cluster. In the worst case, if you really need to collocate both, set MR to use less Map and Reduce slots than you'd normally configure, possibly just one.

When HBase is used for OLAP operations, it's preferable to set it up in a hardened way like configuring the ZooKeeper session timeout higher and giving more memory to the MemStores (the argument being that the Block Cache won't be used much since the workloads are usually long scans).