Hortonworks announced on the 17th December 2014 that VMware’s Big Data Extensions tool for Hadoop on virtual machines is now both HDP Certified and Operations Ready. HDP is the Hortonworks Data Platform – an open Hadoop platform that is centered on YARN. The Operations Ready designation is a new certification introduced by Hortonworks to focus attention on those tools that integrate in an approved way with Apache Ambari by making use of the open Ambari management application programming interfaces. The focus of the program is to certify operational tools for managing a Hadoop/HDP cluster. The Operations Ready program also provides assurance to enterprises adopting Hadoop that the tools they select to run and interact with Hadoop have been tested and validated to work correctly. At VMware we are excited to get this additional level of certification for VMware’s BDE and we look forward to continued engineering collaboration with Hortonworks.
Here is the description of the new Operations Ready program from Hortonworks:
BDE 2.1 was announced as being Generally Available in October 2014. One of the central new features in BDE 2.1 is better integration with the de-facto Hadoop management tools from the distro vendors. Chief among those tools is Ambari. This integration with Ambari was the result of a request made to us directly by the VMware BDE user community.
BDE 2.1, with the new application manager construct, can now use the Ambari APIs under the covers to provision the HDP software into the virtual machines that it has created through cloning its template virtual machine. This method of deploying everything through BDE ensures that the resulting new Hadoop cluster is entirely compatible with Ambari. That is important because many of our users would like to use Ambari and VMware vCenter together from the point at which a cluster is provisioned onwards.
Ambari is the management tool of choice among HDP users in order to gain insight into what is going on at runtime at the Hadoop level (e.g. checking the status of HDFS, YARN, MapReduce and other services) and to make service changes there.
VMware vCenter is the virtualization infrastructure management tool that is in use at tens of thousands of VMware’s customers to view system behavior and performance at the virtual infrastructure level (virtual machines, physical machines, consumed resources and performance data). vCenter with the BDE plug-in is in popular use for deploying user Hadoop clusters today at many enterprises.
The BDE plug-in uses the vCenter APIs as well as the Ambari Blueprint APIs. Combining the two tools together to collaborate on the Hadoop provisioning details simplifies the management of your virtualized Hadoop cluster significantly. Both the Hadoop application architect and the virtualization manager can converse about the components of the HDP cluster and their effect on hardware consumption.
Hortonworks’ new Operations Ready program is one of a set of certifications that are currently available from the company. Other certifications available are the YARN Ready, Security Ready and Governance Ready programs. You can read more about the new programs here: http://hortonworks.com/blog/accelerating-adoption-enterprise-hadoop
