Hadoop on your PC: Cloudera’s CDH4 virtual machine by Andrew Brust.
From the post:
Want to learn Hadoop without building your own cluster or paying for cloud resources? Then download Cloudera’s Hadoop distro and run it in a virtual machine on your PC. I’ll show you how.
As good a way as any to get your feet wet with Hadoop.
Don’t be surprised if in a week or two you have both the nucleus of a cluster and a cloud account. Reasoning that you need to be prepared for any client’s environment of choice.
Or at least that is what you will tell your significant other.