Ability impaired using HBase on multihomed hosts

For HBase clusters running on unusual networks (such as NAT'd cloud environments or physical machines with multiple IP's per network interface) it would be ideal to have a way to both specify:

1. which IP interface to which HBase master or region-server will bind
2. what hostname HBase will advertise in Zookeeper both for a master or region-server process

While efforts such as HBASE-8640 go a long way to normalize these two sources of information, it is not possible in the current design of the properties available to an administrator for these to be unambiguously specified.

One has been able to request hbase.master.ipc.address or hbase.regionserver.ipc.address but one can not specify the desired HBase hbase.master.hostname. (It was removed in HBASE-1357, further I am unaware of a region-server equivalent.)

I use a configuration management system to generate all of my configuration files on a per-machine basis. As such, an option to generate a file specifying exactly which hostname to use would be helpful.

Today, specifying the bind address for HBase works and one can use an HBase-only DNS for faking what to put in Zookeeper but this is far from ideal. Network interfaces have no intrinsic IP address, nor hostname. Specifing a DNS server is awkward as the DNS server may differ from the system's resolver and is a single IP address. Similarly, on hosts which use a transient VIP (e.g. through keepalived) for other services, it means there's a seemingly non-deterministic hostname choice made by HBase depending on the state of the VIP at daemon start-up time.

I will attach two networking examples I use which become very difficult to manage under the current properties.