Is it possible to set up hive metastore and hive server2 services on separate nodes? I know that HDP ambari forces you to set up the two on the same node, along with webhcat, I believe, but what about other venders such as Cloudera? and others?
hiveserver and hive-metastore server are independent daemons that can be run different nodes. A thrift based connection is used for communication. In Cloudera distribution and MapR we have an option, I'nk Hortonworks also should include.