get "ERROR: Can't get master address from ZooKeeper; znode data == null" when using Hbase shell

If you just want to run HBase without going into Zookeeper management for standalone HBase, then remove all the property blocks from hbase-site.xml except the property block named hbase.rootdir.

Now run /bin/start-hbase.sh. HBase comes with its own Zookeeper, which gets started when you run /bin/start-hbase.sh, which will suffice if you are trying to get around things for the first time. Later you can put distributed mode configurations for Zookeeper.

You only need to run /sbin/start-dfs.sh for running HBase since the value of hbase.rootdir is set to hdfs://127.0.0.1:9000/hbase in your hbase-site.xml. If you change it to some location on local the filesystem using file:///some_location_on_local_filesystem, then you don't even need to run /sbin/start-dfs.sh.

hdfs://127.0.0.1:9000/hbase says it's a place on HDFS and /sbin/start-dfs.sh starts namenode and datanode which provides underlying API to access the HDFS file system. For knowing about Yarn, please look at http://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r2.3.0/hadoop-yarn/hadoop-yarn-site/YARN.html.

This could also happen if the vm or the host machine is put to sleep ,Zookeeper will not stay live. Restarting the VM should solve the problem.

You need to start zookeeper and then run Hbase-shell

{HBASE_HOME}/bin/hbase-daemons.sh {start,stop} zookeeper

and you may want to check this property in hbase-env.sh

# Tell HBase whether it should manage its own instance of Zookeeper or not.export HBASE_MANAGES_ZK=false

Refer to Source - Zookeeper