Setting up a mini cluster to train with on your PC.

So you may have already downloaded the Cloudera VM and are getting familiar with the single node environment setup.  This is great to run the tutorials and get familiar with all the ecosystem components, however if you are trying to understand Hadoop and get your admin certificate then you need to know how to build and setup a cluster from scratch.

The good news is you can do this right on your laptop if you done have more than one PC. Practice setting up and tearing down your very own cluster for training purposes is pretty easy once you do your research.

Whats even better is I went through this growing pain many, many months ago when I first started so I will post the links/resources I used of the many blogs and forums in my next few posts I used to get my system up and running.

Hopefully with my lessons learned your training will go smoothly.

What you need to get started to mirror what I did is below.

1. At least one PC with 16GB of memory. You will run 4 VM's  each taking up a portion of you ram to mimic your cluster.
2. I used Oracle Virtual box as my VM to install my OS and Hadoop.
3. Download a opensource Linux OS to use.  I choose CentOS.

From there I followed instructions on post I found on Cloudera, which you may have already found if you found this blog.

http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/2014/01/how-to-create-a-simple-hadoop-cluster-with-virtualbox/