Running Alluxio on Virtual Box

• Prerequisites
• Launch a Cluster
• Access the cluster
• Destroy the cluster

Alluxio can be deployed on VirtualBox on your local machine using the Vagrant scripts that come with Alluxio. The scripts let you create, configure, and destroy clusters that come automatically configured with HDFS.

Prerequisites

Install VirtualBox

Download VirtualBox

Install Vagrant

Download Vagrant

Install Alluxio

Download Alluxio to your local machine, and unzip it:

wget http://alluxio.org/downloads/files/1.6.1/alluxio-1.6.1-bin.tar.gz
tar xvfz alluxio-1.6.1-bin.tar.gz

Install python library dependencies

Install python>=2.7, not python3.

Under deploy/vagrant directory in your home directory, run:

sudo bash bin/install.sh

Alternatively, you can manually install pip, and then in deploy/vagrant run:

sudo pip install -r pip-req.txt

Launch a Cluster

Now you can launch the Alluxio cluster with Hadoop2.4.1 as under filesystem by running the script under deploy/vagrant:

./create <number of machines> vb

Each node of the cluster runs an Alluxio worker, and the AlluxioMaster runs an Alluxio master.

Access the cluster

Access through Web UI

After the command ./create <number of machines> vb succeeds, you can see two green lines like below shown at the end of the shell output:

>>> AlluxioMaster public IP is xxx, visit xxx:19999 for Alluxio web UI<<<
>>> visit default port of the web UI of what you deployed <<<

Default port for Alluxio Web UI is 19999.

Default port for Hadoop Web UI is 50070.

Visit http://{MASTER_IP}:{PORT} in the browser to access the Web UIs.

Access with ssh

The nodes set up are named as AlluxioMaster, AlluxioWorker1, AlluxioWorker2 and so on.

To ssh into a node, run:

vagrant ssh <node name>

For example, you can ssh into AlluxioMaster with:

vagrant ssh AlluxioMaster

All software is installed under the root directory, e.g. Alluxio is installed in /alluxio, and Hadoop is installed in /hadoop.

On the AlluxioMaster node, you can run tests against Alluxio to check its health:

/alluxio/bin/alluxio runTests

After the tests finish, visit Alluxio web UI at http://{MASTER_IP}:19999 again. Click Browse File System in the navigation bar, and you should see the files written to Alluxio by the above tests.

From a node in the cluster, you can ssh to other nodes in the cluster without password with:

ssh AlluxioWorker1

Destroy the cluster

Under deploy/vagrant directory, you can run:

./destroy

to destroy the cluster that you created. Only one cluster can be created at a time. After the command succeeds, the virtual machines are terminated.