Ambari to support Hybrid cluster

We have been exploring Hybrid hadoop cluster recently. By hybrid, i mean the nodes in the cluster have different platform architectures. Some nodes are intel x86_64 , some are IBM Power ppc64le., and so on. Right now Ambari doesn't have this hybrid support. It selects the repo based on the machine where it is installed and then ask the users to add the nodes. I think this order has to be changed as the first step to provide hybrid support in Ambari.

We were actually able to bring up a hybrid cluster using some hacks (not so good) like manually configuring the yum repos according to the arch, installing the rpms before ambari does and also manipulating the JAVA_HOME variable. We also ran some examples like terasort without any issues.

So the thing here is we kind of starting to work on making Ambari provide a smooth hybrid support which requires some design changes. We very much welcome Ambari community to provide some ideas, patch contributions, or whatever way you can help us on.