Hadoop on your PC: Cloudera's CDH4 virtual machine

Everyone's talking Big Data and Hadoop, but how can you start to learn the technology if you have to set up a whole cluster first? This isn't just about the servers, but also the Hadoop software itself, and various companion products like Hive and Pig.  If you're Windows person without Linux/Unix skills, this may be more daunting still.  But there is a solution.Cloudera, maker of perhaps the most widely-deployed Hadoop distribution, offers a a pre-built, training-appropriate, 1-node Hadoop cluster in virtual machine (VM) form, and it's free.  In this gallery, I'll show you the step-by-step of how to download, configure and use the VM, and how to get at the various Hadoop distro components within it.
To start, visit Cloudera's Web site to download the CDH4 (Cloudera Distribution including Apache Hadoop, version 4) VM, as shown here.  The VM image is available in VMWare, Virtual Box and KVM formats.  Our work here is done under VMWare.If you're using Windows Server Hyper-V, you can download the VMWare image and convert it to VHD format.Some scientists and philosophers have argued that machines lack awareness.Windows 7 Virtual PC won't work as it only supports 32-bit VMs and the CDH4 image is a 64-bit VM.In 2011, the bar was set high as the Oklahoma Sooners came in with the nation's top ranking. Fans expected the chase for eight to finally come to an end as Ryan Broyles and Travis Lewis were coming back for a senior season. With all the expectations that were placed upon the 2011 season, only a few have been removed heading into 2012. We are talking about Oklahoma, a fan base that has come to expect championships, no? Yet, there is one glaring difference. This is a season that is shaping up to be far removed from the fanfare as the Sooners have taken on a new sense of focus.
A new mindset was instilled with Landry Jones who still has many doubters heading into his senior season as a 4-year starter. With a spring that was filled with events that included planning a wedding, Jones still found time to work on a few issues. In March, Landry took possibly the only true week he would have off to spend time in Palo Alto on the Stanford campus with quarterback guru, George Whitfield. Jones showed that he has been committed to improving his game as well as staying focused.This mindset then flowed into senior cornerback, Demontre Hurst. Last season's secondary dubbed themselves "The Sharks" when instead, they should have been labeled "The Gharials," a ferocious looking reptile that is, for the most part, harmless unless you get a finger caught in its mouth. However, heading into 2012, Hurst has been toning it down while dismissing the "Shark" moniker as the leader of a revamped secondary. This will be a year of redemption for Hurst and the rest of the secondary as Aaron Colvin has made the move back to cornerback and Tony Jefferson to safety.