There isn't any pain. Best of all it's easy to setup hadoop on a single machine, or two machines here and there and then them into a large cluster: Here's a go

There isn't any pain. Best of all it's easy to setup hadoop on a single machine, or two machines here and there and then them into a large cluster: Here's a good tutorial that may help: http://www.michael-noll.com/wiki/Running_Hadoop_On_Ubuntu_Linux_%28Single-Node_Cluster%29 http://www.michael-noll.com/wiki/Running_Hadoop_On_Ubuntu_Li... (If you're using a Linux machine just follow that; otherwise get VMWare running Ubuntu and set it up there).