VMware released the latest version of Big Data Extensions during Hadoop Summit on June 4, 2015. Included in the release notes, there are two features that have me really excited for this version.

Resize Hadoop Clusters on Demand. You can reduce the number of virtual machines in a running Hadoop cluster, allowing you to manage resources in your VMware ESXi and vCenter Server environments. The virtual machines are deleted, releasing all resources such as memory, CPU, and I/O.

Increase Cloning Performance and Resource Usage of Virtual Machines. You can rapidly clone and deploy virtual machines using Instant Clone, a feature of vSphere 6.0. Using Instant Clone, a parent virtual machine is forked, and then a child virtual machine (or instant clone) is created. The child virtual machine leverages the storage and memory of the parent, reducing resource usage.

These are really outstanding features, especially the ability to use the Instant Clone (aka VMFork) functionality introduced in vSphere 6.0. The Instant Clone technology has very interesting implications when considered with the work in the Cloud Native Application space. Deploying a very small Photon VM to immediately launch a Docker container workload in a matter of seconds will add a huge benefit to running virtualized Apache Mesos clusters (with Marathon) that have been deployed using the BDE framework.

I had hoped to see the functionality from the BDE Fling that included recipes for Mesos and Kubernetes to be incorporated into the official VMware release. On a positive note, the cookbooks for Mesos, Marathon and Kubernetes are present on the management server. It will just take a little effort to unlock those features.

06.27.2015 UPDATE: I have confirmed all of the cookbooks for Mesos, Docker and Kubernetes are present on the BDE v2.2 management server. I will have a post shortly describing how to unlock them for use.

Overall, a big release from the VMware team and it appears they are on the right track to increase the functionality of the BDE framework!