Cloudera has made Hadoop demo packages for VMware, KVM and VirtualBox.
I tried two of them this weekend and would not recommend either one of them.
1. VMware – After uncompressing the image, loads and runs easy enough (remember to up the RAM to 2 GB). The only problem comes when you try to run the Hadoop Tutorial as suggested at the image page. Path is wrong in the tutorial for the current release. Rather than 0.20.2-cdh3u1, it should read (in full) /usr/lib//hadoop-0.20/hadoop-0.20.2-cdh3u2-core.jar.
There are other path/directory issues, such as /usr/joe. No where to be seen in this the demo release.
BTW, the xterm defaults to a nearly unreadable blue color for directories. If you try to reset it, you will think there is no change. Try “xterm” to spawn a new xterm window. Your changes will appear there. Think about it for a minute and it will make sense.
2. VirtualBox – Crashes every time I run it. I have three other VMs that work just fine so I suspect it isn’t my setup.
Not encouraging and rather disappointing.
I normally just install Cloudera releases on my Ubuntu box and have always been pleased with the results. Hence the expectation of a good experience with the Demo VM’s.
Demo VM’s are to supposed to entice users to experience the full power of Hadoop, not drive them away.
I would either fix the Demo VM’s to work properly and have pre-installed directories and resources to illustrate the use of Hadoop or stop distributing them.
Just a little QA goes a long way.