The new vSphere Big Data Extensions Version 2.2 shipped on the 5th June 2015!
Here is a quick summary of the new features that appear in the 2.2 release. This is an exciting and much-awaited release. As always, refer to the technical documents and the release notesto get more detail on these subjects.
• Support for the Latest Hadoop Distributions. BDE 2.2 supports the latest versions from the major Hadoop distribution vendors, including Bigtop 0.8, Cloudera CDH 5.4, Hortonworks HDP 2.2, MapR 4.1, and Pivotal PHD 3.0.
• Better Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) Management. We found that some users had difficulty with generating FQDNs within their network for newly cloned virtual machines. BDE can now generate and propagate meaningful host names in FQDN form for your new virtual machines that host the Hadoop nodes. The new FQDNs will be registered to a DNS server if you are using a Dynamic DNS server.
• Shrink clusters. You can now reduce (as well as expand) the number of worker virtual machines that belong to a running Hadoop cluster in an easy way. The virtual machines targeted for shrinking will be quiesced, withdrawn from the Hadoop cluster and then deleted to release any resources that they used completely.
• Active Directory/Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (AD/LDAP) integration. You can use an AD/LDAP server to manage the accounts generated by BDE within the Hadoop nodes . You can specify the accounts to be Hadoop users accounts and/or service accounts in an AD/LDAP server.
• vSphere 6.0 Instant Clone. BDE will, at the user’s request, use Instant Clone technology to spin up new Hadoop VMs. This feature reduces the time of spinning up Hadoop VMs and the runtime footprint. This is an optional way to do this. You can choose to use the older “full clone” method also if you prefer to. We recommend that you use this new type of cloning for your test and development workloads to begin with. • Centralised logging. You can configure BDE to direct logging information to an external syslog server including LogInsight. • Quiesce the BDE management server. You can quiesce BDE management server with a command so that you can backup BDE management server’s data for your clusters safely. • Automatic GUI installation. BDE GUI is automatically registered to the vCenter after BDE is deployed.
• Support for the Latest Partner Hadoop Management Tools. BDE 2.2 supports Cloudera Manager 5.3, and Ambari 1.7. You have more flexibility to deploy Hadoop clusters, including a compute-only cluster,a HBase-only cluster,a data-compute separated cluster etc. even when using a Partner Hadoop Management tool.
• Support for the Latest Isilon Version. Fully automated process to deploy and manage compute only clusters on OneFS 7.2.
• Big Data Extensions Upgrade. You can upgrade Big Data Extensions 2.1 to the current version, Big Data Extensions 2.2, and preserve all the data for the Hadoop clusters that were created using Big Data Extensions 2.1. All of your existing clusters can be managed by Big Data Extensions once the upgrade completes.
• Localization. BDE is localized to 6 languages including DE, FR, ZH_CN, ZH_TW, KO, and JA.
