Why Hadoop is tightly bound to linux?

Question

I am new with Hadoop. What are the specific reasons why Hadoop is so tightly bound with Linux, and the cluster it runs upon is homogeneous?

I'm looking for really specific details that can tell me why Hadoop does not work well with windows, and if there are some libraries some specific scripts that are involved?

My project is to deploy Hadoop without using Cygwin. I have already seen the article from Hayes Davis where he explained how to install Hadoop without Cygwin, but he said that there are some bugs. I might start from scratch to properly configure Hadoop on Windows, but if any one can explain what, specifically, are the reasons that Hadoop doesn't work well on windows that would be very helpful.

Answer 1

According to their Quick Start page, it hasn't been well-tested yet.

• GNU/Linux is supported as a development and production platform. Hadoop has been demonstrated on GNU/Linux clusters with 2000 nodes.
• Win32 is supported as a development platform. Distributed operation has not been well tested on Win32, so it is not supported as a production platform.

Windows has much better remote management support than most people realize, but it's still tough to beat Linux when it comes to the ease (and price tag) of setting up a large compute farm. This is just a guess, but perhaps it's less likely that researchers who need to build such massive clusters want to put much of their budget toward OS licensing.

Answer 2

Are you aware of the Hadoop work on which Microsoft and Hortonworks are collaborating, essentially committing changes to the Apache project for native Windows support?

The project is still in a preview phase, with Hadoop on Azure being the first part of the rollout. This is Hadoop running on Windows Server 2008R2 in the Windows Azure cloud. It will also be available for installation on premises for building your own clusters.

I'd recommend learning more and signing up for the program, since you'd be recreating what they've already spent man years on.