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Quick Start Guide - Installing a cluster with Ambari (with local VMs)

This document shows how to quickly set up a cluster using Ambari on your local machine using virtual machines.
This utilizes VirtualBox and Vagrant so you will need to install both.
Note that the steps were created and tested on MacOS 10.8.4.

Setup

Install VirtualBox from: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
Install Vagrant from: http://downloads.vagrantup.com

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cp ~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key ~

Starting VMs

First, change directory to ambari-vagrant:

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For example, *./up.sh 3* starts 3 VMs.  3 seems to be a good number with 16GB of RAM without taxing the system too much.
You can specify up to 10 (if your computer can handle it!)
VMs will have the FQDN <os-code>\[01-10\].ambari.apache.org, where <os-code> is c59 (CentOS 5.9), c64 (CentOS 6.4), etc.
E.g., c5901.ambari.apache.org, c6401.ambari.apache.org, etc.
VMs will have the IP address 192.168.<os-subnet>.1\[01-10\], where <os-subnet> is 59 for CentOS 5.9, 64 for CentOS 6.4, etc.
E.g., 192.168.59.101, 192.168.64.101, etc.

Testing Ambari

Log into the VM:

vagrant ssh c6401

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When done testing, run vagrant destroy -f to purge the VMs.

Basic VM Operations

vagrant up <vm name>
Starts a specific VM. up.sh is a wrapper for this call.
Note: if you don’t specify the <vm name> parameter, it will try to start 10 VMs
You can run this if you want to start more VMs after you already called up.sh
For example: vagrant up c6406

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vagrant status
Shows which VMs are running, suspended, etc.

Modifying RAM for the VMs

Each VM is allocated 2GB of RAM. These can be changed by editing Vagrantfile. To change the RAM allocation, modify the following line:

vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", 2048] 

Misc

All VMs launched will have a directory called /vagrant inside the VM. This maps to the ambari-vagrant/<os> directory on your local computer. You can use this shared directory mapping to push files, etc.

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