Installing Apache Hadoop in virtual-machine-based environments

Big data not only refers to machine learning, artificial intelligence, statistics and programming. It also refers to the computing infrastructure and software frameworks that make things happen. Regardless of the positive and negative aspects of any technology, Apache Hadoop is the state of the art in big data analytics. One of its several features consists in relying on off-the-shelf computers, connected in a networked environment and equipped with very minimal hardware. Unreliability, crashes, reboots and failures are not really a problem for Hadoop, provided a number of nodes is up and running and a good amount of redundancy by replication has been guaranteed by the administrator.

Installing Apache Hadoop.

If the idea is to start Apache Hadoop at the earliest, downloading the binary will save a lot of time. A good start is the official website. Unzip the binaries in a directory of choice. We are installing Hadoop in /opt/hadoop

wget http://apache.belnet.be/hadoop/core/hadoop-2.6.0/hadoop-2.6.0.tar.gz sudo tar xvf hadoop-2.6.0.tar.gz -C /opt/ cd /opt sudo mv hadoop-2.6.0/ hadoop

Allow your user (in this case frag) to access the hadoop directory

sudo chown -R frag hadoop

Let your Hadoop user (if any) know where things are. In this case java has been installed at the path indicated by JAVA_HOME env variable. Check yours before applying changes to ~/.bashrc

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64 export HADOOP_HOME=/usr/local/hadoop export PATH=$HADOOP_HOME/bin:$PATH

A problem I found when launching Hadoop is about the JAVA_HOME. Apparently, it is required to add JAVA_HOME also to /opt/hadoop/etc/hadoop/hadoop-env.sh which will look like this

# The java implementation to use. #export JAVA_HOME=${JAVA_HOME} export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64

At this point, the command launched from the console should return the instructions to run and usage for some sub-commands. If this fails, do not continue, since there is already something wrong.

Configuring Hadoop

Now we configure the directory where Hadoop will store its data files, network settings, and some other configuration options that might come useful later. In my case, frag is the user, and I decided to store the local file system at the path /usr/local/hadoop/tmp Therefore, I create this directory

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/hadoop/tmp

and set permissions as before

sudo chown frag /usr/local/hadoop/tmp/

Do this with your username and for all other users who are allowed to access Also restrict a bit the security policy with

sudo chmod 750 /usr/local/hadoop/tmp/

The most important part comes now, with the configuration of some fundamental files of the Hadoop platform.

core-site.xml

cd /opt/hadoop/etc/hadoop/ sudo vi core-site.xml sudo cp mapred-site.xml.template mapred-site.xml 

<configuration> <property> <name>hadoop.tmp.dir</name> <value>/usr/local/hadoop/tmp</value> <description>A base for other temporary directories.</description> </property> <property> <name>fs.default.name</name> <value>hdfs://localhost:9000</value> <description>The name of the default file system. A URI whose scheme and authority determine the FileSystem implementation. The uri's scheme determines the config property (fs.SCHEME.impl) naming the FileSystem implementation class. The uri's authority is used to determine the host, port, etc. for a filesystem.</description> </property> </configuration>

mapred-site.xml

sudo vi mapred-site.xml 

<configuration> <property> <name>mapred.job.tracker</name> <value>localhost:9001</value> <description>The host and port that the MapReduce job tracker runs at. If "local", then jobs are run in-process as a single map and reduce task. </description> </property> </configuration>

hdfs-site.xml

sudo vi hdfs-site.xml 

<configuration> <property> <name>dfs.replication</name> <value>2</value> <description>Default block replication. The actual number of replications can be specified when the file is created. The default is used if replication is not specified in create time. </description> </property> </configuration>

The replication value determines how many times a chunk of the RDD should be replicated across the nodes. For a testing environment 2 is more than enough. In production, however, a much higher replication value should be considered to increase the reliability of the overall cluster.

Format the HDFS filesystem

In general, a new file system must be formatted. This holds for HDFS too. The command below does the job.

$ /opt/hadoop/bin/hadoop namenode -format

This should not be done while the cluster is running, or all data will suddenly be deleted. It’s time to start the machine. From the master node

/opt/hadoop/sbin/start-dfs.sh

At this point some ssh connections are performed by the master towards the slaves (those are pseudo nodes, since they run on the same machine, just for the sake of the tutorial). ssh will ask for authentication three times, for DataNode, SecondaryNameNode and NameNode (in reverse order). For production systems this is not ideal. Hence, a ssh key should be provided for the user who’s going to work with Hadoop. In order to configure ssh not to ask for a password every time, type this in all machines that belong to the cluster

cat .ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh b@B 'cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys2' chmod 700 .ssh chmod 640 .ssh/authorized_keys2

Playing with the filesystem

In order to create a virtual filesystem within Hadoop, a directory tree like the traditional one should be created. In this example I will create the hadoop/data path.

$hadoop fs -mkdir /hadoop $hadoop fs -mkdir /hadoop/data

Indeed, a list of the hadoop root directory returns what I expect.

$ hadoop fs -ls /hadoop Found 1 items drwxr-xr-x - frag supergroup 0 2015-04-20 17:22 /hadoop/data

Seems to work! In order to make a local file visible in the Hadoop infrastructure, it must be copied from local filesystem (or wherever it is) to HDFS. In this case localfile.txt is copies to the root directory of HDFS as file.txt.

$ bin/hadoop dfs -copyFromLocal ~/localfile.txt  /file.txt

Check up

The java utility jps gives a print of the running Hadoop processes. It should return something like this

$ jps 28130 DataNode 28323 SecondaryNameNode 27968 NameNode 28471 Jps

Seems to work!

Monitoring

Once Hadoop is up and running, it is possible to point the browser to the master node (vlab1 in my case) http://vlab1:50070 and monitor all resources and the complete status of the infrastructure from the master node vlab1. There is also a HDFS NameNode web interface at http://vlab1:8042 where, again, vlab1 is the hostname of the master node.

Stop Hadoop

In order to stop the cluster

/opt/hadoop/sbin/stop-dfs.sh

The master node is stopping Hadoop from within each of the slave nodes. No ssh password should be required though.

Virtualization technology

At home I don’t have thousands of physical machines to try this out. I do have virtual machines though, as many as I want (until complete exhaustion of computer memory). After setting one Ubuntu virtual machine in VirtualBox and installing and configuring everything as explained above, I just cloned it to get three running virtual machines in a matter of minutes. It’s time for me to enjoy my virtual Hadoop cluster.

Happy Hadooping!

Originally published at worldofpiggy.com on September 7, 2015.