New capabilities have been added in Serengeti 0.8.0, which extend the reach of partner-supported Hadoop versions and capabilities. The new release also adds support for HBase.
Project Serengeti is an open source project sponsored by VMware. It provides Hadoop users with easy to use management tools to provision, manage, and monitor Hadoop clusters on VMware vSphere. This includes common components like HDFS, MapReduce, HBase, Pig, Hive Client and Hive Server. Serengeti is consumed by customers as a pre-packaged virtual appliance. Customers can upload Hadoop distributions of their choice, and configure Serengeti to deploy their distributions.
Details of the new release are detailed in a blog post by Richard McDougall, application infrastructure CTO and principal engineer in the Office of the CTO at VMware
Strengthening support for Hadoop and big data applications in a virtual environment, the new release of Serengeti provides support for MapR Hadoop distributions, and Cloudera CDH4, in addition to Apache Hadoop 1.0. Hortonworks HDP-1.0, Cloudera CDH3, Greenplum GPHD-1.2.
Support for HBase, the Hadoop database, includes the ability to deploy an HBase instance with full integration to MapReduce, exposing the Thrift and REST APIs; HMaster HA, in an active and hot standby configuration using VMware HA; and elastic scaling to allow the cluster to expand with a single command.
There is also special support for temporary data, since Hadoop has significant ephemeral data use, and the ability to provision a shared file system service specifically for the shared data, McDougall notes in his blog.
For Serengeti 0.8.0 release notes, go here.