Eating the elephant one bite at a time: Some tips in setting up the Hortonworks Sandbox VM

In this blog post series, we will look at how the Business Intelligence professional can learn to use Big Data as a source. This series is mainly aimed at Microsoft and Tableau professionals, but everyone is welcome. Creighton Abrams once said “When eating an elephant, take one time at a time” and this is how we are going to start learning Big Data using Microsoft and Hortonworks technologies.

A great place to start is the Hadoop Sandbox, generously provided by Hortonworks. To get started, you can download it here. It has a number of pre-configured tutorials, and we are going to use it here to get us started looking at Hadoop.

Once you’ve downloaded the VM, you can open it in your preferred VM mechanism. I chose VMWare Player simply because it’s what I am most accustomed to using.

Once you’ve downloaded the VM, the instructions for VMWare can be obtained from here.

When the VM is booted up, it instructs you to visit an IP address on the host machine. What happens if you get the message:

2. Check to make sure that the network adapter on the VMWare adapter is able to receive IP addresses via DHCP. To do this, go to Network Sharing and Properties, click on the VM Adapter and select ‘Diagnose’.

These steps should resolve the issue.
I hope that helps.

The next step in this series is to see how we can create databases, and we can start to have some fun with data.

Jen