A very exciting recent development in the OpenSolaris world is a Hadoop Live CD (What is Hadoop?) based on OpenSolaris.
What does it have?
The CD image provided gives users an environment emulating a fully distributed, three-node virtual Hadoop cluster. One of the reasons we used OpenSolaris is its ability to emulate a multinode cluster environment in a very small memory foot print. A three-node Map/Reduce cluster can be brought up on a machine with as little as 800 MB of memory. Each additional virtual cluster node only requires about 40 MB of additional memory, in addition to the memory used by Hadoop. This means that people can take Hadoop for a spin, even on their laptop.
A quick look at the Quict Start Guide shows that, it uses 3 Solaris zones- a Global zone for job tracking and 2 worker zones for carrying out the jobs.
Links:
- Project Page: http://opensolaris.org/os/project/livehadoop/
- Downloads: http://opensolaris.org/os/project/livehadoop/Downloads/
VirtualBox allows you try the ISO without burning it to a CD
