Windows Server 2008 R2

Getting started with HDInsight (a.k.a Microsoft’s Big Data hadoop Platform) on local Windows Machine!

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Recently Microsoft announced HDInsight on Windows server! and so it’s good to get a chance to play with its public preview! Currently there two ways you can run HDInsight: 1) Via Windows Azure 2) On your local Windows machine.

In this blog-post, I would show you step by step to install a HDInsight on a local Windows Machine. For the purpose of this blog-post, I am going to show it on Windows 7 but it also supported on Windows Server 2008 R2.

download hadoop on windows machine hdinsight

Note that the ideal audience for this blog-post would be a developer who wants to kick tires of Hadoop on windows machine to see what it can do! If I had wanted to target it to Hadoop administrators then I would have shown how to do it on Windows Server and also how to manage the Hadoop cluster with system center. But for this blog-post, I am going to target developers so that they can get started playing with Hadoop on a windows machine! With that, here are the steps to install Hadoop (HDInight) on Windows 7:

1) open Web Platform Installer. Download and install it if you haven’t yet.

2) search for Hadoop

install hadoop windows via web platform installer

3) Install it!

4) You should get a message saying that it successfully installed it!

5) Do you see a Microsoft HDInsight Dashboard ICON on your Desktop? Yes? Great! Open it!

windows hadoop big data dashboard6) And here’s the IIS manager showing the site that hosts the above Dashboard. Just wanted to show this to folks who might not see the Dashboard at http://localhost:8085/

IIS windows hadoop local host site port 8085

7) That’s about it for his post. If you want to continue learning, check out the “documentation” link at the bottom on the Hadoop Dashboard which is: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/6204.hadoop-based-services-for-windows-en-us.aspx

Conclusion:

In this blog-post, we saw how to install HDInsight (Microsoft’s Hadoop) on local windows machine.

Related Articles:

Who on earth is creating “Big data”?

Want to learn about BigData? read Oreilly’s Book “Planning for BigData”

How to Install Microsoft HDInsight Server Hadoop on Windows 8 Professional

Five quick reasons why I use virtual machines on my personal computer:

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I was talking to a friend yesterday about virtual machines.  The topic got started because I had about  4 virtual machines and I had to explain why I had such a setup – why just not “dual-boot” – and so I thought I document the reasons that I gave out. Note that I am using Virtual Machines on my personal computer and this blog post falls into the class of “personal technology” and I’ll not touch upon why businesses use virtual machines. Before we begin, a quick note about what are virtual machines? Think of virtual machines as “software application” that can run “operating systems” in them. Example: You have Windows X on your machine and there’s an application on your machine that says “LinuxOS.xyz” – if you click on it, it would open Linux operating system as an application without leaving your windows machine. This is not technically correct definition but from a personal technology standpoint, all you need to know is that “virtual machines” lets you run operating systems like linux, windows, etc like an application on your main operating system. Here’s my current configuration: “I have windows 7 as my main operating system. and I have a couple of virtual machines running Windows Server 2008 R2, one virtual machine having a windows 7 environment & one machine to kick tires of Hadoop”. with that, here are the reasons that I use virtual machines:

1) I can have multiple flavors of operating systems running as application on top of my “main operating systems”. And I do not have to worry about the hassles of dual/multiple boot.

2) I can COPY a virtual machine and PASTE it on a different machine. Basically share “OS along w/ app installed” with others or open them up using a different computer

3) I can “Save” a state of a virtual machine. For example I can save the state of my virtual machine today and if something happens tomorrow then I can just “restore” it to the previously saved state. Think of it like “system restore”

4) When I am on a virtual machine, it gives me the freedom to play around with “do not touch” and “not recommended” configuration. I can experiment things I want to without worrying about “breaking” my main operation system

5) Do you have software’s on your OS that you installed for one-off purpose and forgot to uninstall it later? I usually install applications that I rarely use on a separate virtual machine. This helps me keep my main operating system cleaner.

Those were the quick five reasons I use virtual machines on my computer, if you want to get started you can check out: Microsoft virtual PC or Oracle’s Virtual Box.

Question: Do you use virtual machines on your personal computer? Yes? What is your “why”?  why not share that in the comments section?

Did you knew: You can change the Location of “Desktop” folder

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Did you knew that we can change the location the “Desktop” folder. Yes! The default location where files/folders are stored is “c:users<xyz>desktop” and you can change this.

But why do you want to do this?

1.FUN!

2. It’s a good practice to separate USER data and SYSTEM data. So if you have a D (Or E?) drive in your computer, you can change the location of the Desktop from C to D (or E).

So how do you do that?

1. Go to c:users<xyz>desktop

2. Right Click on the Desktop Folder and select “Properties”

dekstop folder properties 3. In the properties dialog box. Select “Location” and after entering the NEW LOCATION – click on MOVE. 

location property of the desktop folder

Click on Apply. You’re done!

I tested it on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and it works. It does not seem to work with Windows XP. If you know of any windows OS’s where it works – let us know in the comments!

I thought of writing this as a blog-post after this tip that I submitted was well-received. Any-who that’s about it for this post, I hope it was helpful!

Bird’s Eye view of SharePoint BI Dev Environment Setup process (SQL Server 2012, Sharepoint 2010)

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Step 1
Get the Binaries: SQL Server 2012 RTM, Windows Server 2008 R2, Sharepoint 2010 SP1 x64
Setup a VM: Check the System Requirements and configure the VM. And then Install Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 SP1 (and updates)
Step 2
Add Server Roles: Application Server, File Services, Web Server
Change Server Name to a friendly Name
Step 3
At this stage, I cloned the Virtual Machine. And the following steps will be performed on the cloned (copied) virtual Machine. Thanks for the tip that I found here.
The benefit of cloning is that you have a Windows Server 2008 R2 VM Template that you can use in Future.
Step 4
On the cloned VM, run dcpromo.exe. This will make your server the Domain Controller and it will install ADDS binaries if they are not installed prior to running dcpromo.exe
Step 5
Install Sharepoint per-requisites
Install Sharepoint 2010 SP1
Note: Do NOT run the SharePoint configuration wizard
Step 6
Run SQL server setup to Install “SQL Server PowerPivot for SharePoint”:
SQL Server PowerPivot For Sharepoint
Post-Installation: Launch the PowerPivot configuration tool to configure the server
SQL Server PowerPivot For Sharepoint post installation
Step 7
perform a NEW installation of SQL Server
Analysis Services Mode: Tabular
Step 8
perform a NEW installation of SQL Server
Analysis Services Mode: Multi-Dimensional
Step 9
Verifying Reporting Services Installed in Sharepoint Mode. Tutorial here.
Also Extend the Document Libraries to include BISM connections.[Read Follow up Blog Post: How to extend document library to connect to Tabular Model to create Power View reports ]
Step 10
At this point, I installed and ran the SQL Server Training Kit 2012. It will list various “Missing” softwares like office, silverlight and also it will help you install sample databases. It’s a nice “shortcut” to make sure that you a “complete” sharepoint BI dev Environment
sql server training kit 2012 check dependencies

Resources that I refer to for configuration Details:
1) SQL Shorts Video to configure SharePoint BI environment
2) Getting up and running with SQL Server Denali for Business Intelligence (Crescent and PowerPivot in CTP3)
3) Deployment Checklist: Reporting Services, Power View, and PowerPivot for SharePoint

That’s about it for this post. I’ll refer to this post whenever I have to setup my SharePoint BI Dev Environment. And if you are in the same position, then i hope the Bird’s eye view and the resources listed are helpful to you as well.