Saturday, December 15, 2012

Running Teradata Aster Express on a MacBook Pro

To those people who know me, know that I am complete Apple geek.  Teradata's supports BYOD, so naturally I have a MacBook Pro. Why wouldn't I want to run Aster Express on it  :-)

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.

To run the Aster Management console point your favourite browser to https://192.168.100.100 You may ignore any website security certificate warnings and continue to the website.


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.


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this article!
However I have a network issue on both queen and worker node.
When I am logged in the queen node the network status shows "none"
And I cannot access the queen node through 192.168.100.100

Hari said...

Thanks so much for blogging this. I hit the exact same problem that you have outlined and your blog entry is on the dot. Much appreciated.

Big Data Analytics said...

Have you tried Datameer or Hunk?

Anonymous said...

We use VMWare Fusion to run VM created in VMWare Workstation. VMWare Fusion stores its files in bundles, VMWare Workstation - in directories. To run VMs provided by Aster in VMWare Fusion, rename directories "Aster Queen" and "Aster Worker" to "Aster Queen.vmwarevm" and "Aster Worker.vmwarevm".