Roberto V. Zicari interviewing Joe Russell¹ about Hadoop virtualization with Serengeti:

A common misconception when virtualizing Hadoop clusters is that we decouple the data nodes from the physical infrastructure. This is not necessarily true. When users virtualize a Hadoop cluster using Project Serengeti, they separate data from compute while preserving data locality. By preserving data locality, we ensure that performance isn’t negatively impacted, or essentially making the infrastructure appear as static. Additionally, it creates true multi-tenancy within more layers of the Hadoop stack, not just the name node.

I’m not 100% sure I get this, but the way I explained it to myself to actually make sense this would mean that HDFS lives directly on the physical hardware and only the compute part is virtualized. Is that what he means?

Original title and link: Hadoop Virtualization (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.odbms.org/blog/2013/04/on-virtualize-hadoop-interview-with-joe-russell/

Duncan Epping timing how long would take to deploy Hadoop with Serengeti:

How long did that take me? Indeed ~10 minutes

So, Project Serengeti is a sort of Apache Whirr for VMware vSphere.

Original title and link: Deploying Hadoop With Serengeti (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/07/26/deploying-hadoop-with-serengeti/

A very long post by Richard McDougall explaining why virtualizing Hadoop may make sense and how VMware’s Project Serengeti can help. Answering the question in the title, McDougall enumerates 6 reasons:

1. Consolidation/sharing of a big-data platform
2. Rapid provisioning
3. Resource sharing
4. High availability
5. Security
6. Versioned Hadoop environments

He’s also addressing two of the most common questions about Hadoop virtualization:

1. Isn’t there a large performance overhead? Benchmark results are available in a whitepaper that can be read or downloaded below.
2. Doesn’t vSphere use shared SAN storage only? (nb: the short answer is that vSphere supports both local and shared storage)

via: http://cto.vmware.com/project-serengeti-theres-a-virtual-elephant-in-my-datacenter/