The configuration was surprisingly easy once I worked out how!
Prerequisites
- 4 GB memory - (I have 8GB in mine)
- At least 20 GB free disk space
- OS: I am running Mac OS X 10.8.2
- VMware Player: - Buy VMWare Fusion. I have version 5.0.2 (900491)
- ** Make sure to order the professional version, as only this version has the new
- ** Network Editor feature
- 7-Zip: To extract (or uncompress) the Aster Express package.
You get to the Network Editor from Preferences. Create a new network adapter vmnet2 as shown in the screen shot below:
Then make sure that for both the Queen and Worker VMWare images you assign vmnet2 as your network adapter as illustrated in the screenshot below:
That is really the only changes you need to make. Follow the rest of the instructions as outlined in the Getting Started with Aster Express 5.0 to get your Aster nCluster up and running.
If you have 8GB of memory you might decide to allocate 2GB of memory to each VM instead of the 1GB which is the default. Again you can set this in the settings for each VMWare image. I also run the utility Memory Clean (available for free from the App Store). You would be amazed how much a memory hog FireFox and Safari can be. I normally shutdown most other running programs when I am working with Aster Express to give me the best user experience.
You will also find mac versions of act and ncluster_loader in /home/beehive/clients_all/mac. I just copy them to my host. In fact, Once I start up the VMWare images, I do most everything natively from the Mac.
In future posts I plan to cover the following topics:
- How to scale your Aster Express nCluster and make it more reliable
- Demo: From Raw Web log to Business Insight
- Demo: Finding the sentiment in Twitter messages
If there are topics you would like me to cover in the future, then just let me know.
