The first task is to ensure that your system is up-to-date.

This procedure has been tested on the following configuration:

Assumptions:

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Step 1: Download the Cloudera demo virtual machine from the ?Downloads? area of the Cloudera web site.

Click on the ?Download? link beside the ?Virtual Machine? section.

The file should automatically start to download. It will be saved to your ?Downloads? folder.

Step 2: Once the file has downloaded you now need to decompress it. The file that the virtual machine is contained within is a bz2 archive (specifically a bzip2 compressed archive) and can be decompressed with the finder.

Navigate to the ?Downloads? section, and either double-click on the file or right click on the file and then select ‘Open With/Archive Utility (Default). This will start the decompression/unarchiving process.

Step 3: When the archive utility has finished, there will be a folder named cloudera-demo-0.3.7. The contents of which are shown below:

Step 4: Start VirtualBox and create a new VM by clicking the ?New? button. The following is the first dialog for the new virtual machine.

Step 5: Once you click on the ?Continue? button you are presented with the following dialog.

Step 6: Give the new virtual machine a name, in this example we?ll be using ?Cloudera-CDH3?.

For Operating System and Version select ?Linux? and ?Ubuntu?.

Step 7: Increase the base memory to 1024 MB (if possible) for better performance.

Step 8: In this step we need to select the training VM file we just downloaded and extracted. Click on the second radio button ?Use existing hard disk? and then click on the file folder icon with the green ^ on the right hand side of the drop down.

Please Note: The contents of the drop down on your system will be different than that displayed here.

Navigate to the folder where the demo VM is located, in this example it should be in the ?Downloads? folder of the user and called ?cloudera-demo-0.3.7?.

Step 9: Click the ?Continue? button and the following dialog is now displayed and it shows a summary of the choices made so far.

Step 10: Click the ?Done? button to finish the creation of the virtual machine in VirtualBox 4. The following shows the newly created cloudera-CDH3 VM in the VirtualBox manager screen.

Step 11: Start the virtual machine. When the Demo VM launches you should be presented with the following login.

Step 12: Finally, once you have successfully logged into the Demo VM, the image below is the initial view that you should see.

About the author:

John Zanchetta heads up an integration test team in the mobile telecommunications space and is experimenting with CDH from a number of different perspectives. He has been hacking in various technology pools for the past ~20+ years. John can be contacted at johnzan at gmail dot com.