Both Cloudera (CDH) and Hortonworks (HDP) distros make it easy to configure small clusters. You just need to make sure all nodes have clocks properly set and s

Both Cloudera (CDH) and Hortonworks (HDP) distros make it easy to configure small clusters. You just need to make sure all nodes have clocks properly set and synchronized, hostnames and DNS names are set for each machine, SE Linux is turned off, and firewall settings (on each node) allow machines to talk to each other. Also, Dell offers a downloadable Crowbar ISO for Hadoop - and that's Puppet-based, if you are familiar with Puppet.