hbase.cluster.distributed true For psuedo-distributed, you want to set this to true. false means that HBase tries to put Master + RegionServers in one process. Pseudo-distributed = seperate processes/pids hbase.regionserver.hlog.replication 1 For HBase to offer good data durability, we roll logs if filesystem replication falls below a certain amount. In psuedo-distributed mode, you normally only have the local filesystem or 1 HDFS DataNode, so you don't want to roll logs constantly. hbase.tmp.dir /tmp/hbase-testing Temporary directory on the local filesystem.