Installation of InfoSphere BigInsights on Virtual Machine

Since I’m building my expertise in Big Data Analytics, I decided to install BigInsights on my computer (into virtualized environment). IBM InfoSphere BigInsights brings the power of Hadoop to the enterprise. Apache Hadoop is the open source software framework, used to reliably managing large volumes of structured and unstructured data. BigInsights Basic Edition is available for free (link below).

Here is the list of products I used in my installation:

• IBM InfoSphere BigInsights Enterprise Edition v2.0 (paid, free alternative is basic edition available here – you need to register for IBM ID if you already don’t have it)
• VMware Workstation for virtualization (paid, free alternative could be virtualbox)
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 x86-64 (paid, you can get evaluation version for free, another paid alternative is Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 x86-64 which also has free evaluation version, for other systems check system requirements, you can also experiment with some free linux systems, it can work even if IBM doesn’t officially support them)

• Memory: 3.5GB (inititally 2GB was enough, but was slow)
• HDD: 50GB (can be less, depends how much data for analysis are you going to store there)
• Processors: 2 (initially 1 was enough)

Installation Process

1. Create a virtual machine with SUSE linux (or download already preinstalled image)
2. In case you need to increase size of your disk:
   1. In settings of your virtual machine, expand the size of the disk.
   2. Download System Rescue CD (http://www.sysresccd.org).
   3. Mount this image with Deamon Tools.
   4. Go to settings of your vmware machine and make sure CD connection is set to Auto detect and Connect at power on is checked.
   5. Boot your vmware image (press F2 button when vmware is loading, bios window will open, go to boot tab and in the list move CD to the top).
   6. Then start vmware image, select first boot option for System Rescue CD.
   7. When booted, type “startx” and press enter, GUI will turn on.
   8. Then use GParted tool to resize your partition.
   9. Shut down virtual machine and unmount System Rescue CD.
3. Start virtual machine and log in to linux.
4. Download/move installation files for BigInsights (link above).
5. Follow instructions in this video:
   

   Video with transcription is available here.

6. You are done! To start BigInsights next time, log in as biadmin su - biadmin and run this script: /opt/ibm/biginsights/bin/start-all.sh

If everything works fine, you can see this screen:

IBM InfoSphere BigInsights v2.0 running in virtual machine