To make a release, follow the comprehensive HowToRelease documentation substituting hbase wherever core is mentioned.
Before the release, run the following smoke tests (at least).
Smoke Tests
Run unit tests on different hardwares: mac, windows, linux.
Hbase/PerformanceEvaluation describes the PerformanceEvaluation test and a cluster. Releasing 0.1.0, a cluster configuration that had MR and datanodes running on all 4 cluster members -- with the 'head' node carrying namenode, jobtracker, a datanode and a tasktracker and all others a datanode and tasktracker -- and with hbase master on 'head' and a single regionserver on another node, the hbase cluster was able to stay up running 4 concurrent clients doing the sequentialWrite and randomWrite tests with the cluster cleaned between each run all in the default heap of 1G: e.g. $ ./bin/hadoop org.apache.hadoop.hbase.PerformanceEvaluation randomWrite 4 Of, note, the JVM was 1.6. RandomWrite fails w/ 1.5. Also, odd time the randomWrite will fail with NSRE but more often than not passes.