How to test Greenplum Community Edition on VirtualBox

Greenplum Community Edition is available in different flavours, including a VMWare virtual machine based on CentOS with all the fancy tools and the documentation already installed. This allows you to easily try and evaluate this powerful platform for data warehousing.
[Greg Smith from our 2ndQuadrant team, recently explained how to install this image on Linux](http://www.greenplum.com/community/forums/showthread.php?486-Getting-Started-with-VMWare-on-Linux).
This article will guide you through the installation of this image – specifically prepared for VMWare – on VirtualBox, by giving those users the opportunity to easily test and evaluate Greenplum on VirtualBox.

Once you have downloaded the latest version of VirtualBox from [http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads](http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads), you can download the VMWare image for Greenplum through your community account from [http://www.greenplum.com/community/downloads/](http://www.greenplum.com/community/downloads/). Then uncompress it and proceed with the installation.
First and foremost, you need to create a new virtual machine, by clicking “New” and then following the wizard for the creation procedure.
Give a name to the machine and choose “Linux” as operating system and 64-bit RedHat as version.

In the third step, you are asked about memory allocation. For Greenplum’s evaluation you might want to start with – at least – 1024MB, as depicted in the picture below.

In the following screenshot, you must deselect the bootable flag for the disk. If you continue, the following message will be displayed and you will be warned that, without a bootable disk, your server won’t be able to start. What we’ll do is manually add the disk immediately after. Continue and your virtual machine will be created.

Now get in the settings area of your newly created virtual machine. Select the “Storage” tab and add a new hard disk for the virtual IDE controller, by clicking on the “+” sign.
Do not create a new disk, rather choose an existing disk by pointing to the uncompressed VMWare image. Select the first file of the series, named “CentOS 64-bit-cl1.vmdk”.
The virtual machine is now ready to run. However, it won’t work as the window manager has been configured for VWMare graphic card drivers. You will be shown a blue screenshot. Ignore log display by selecting “No” and skip the autoconfiguration for GDM by selecting once again “No”.
At the shell login enter as root (the password is password).
As superuser, you can now uninstall VMWare drivers by executing vmware-uninstall-tools.pl. Reboot.
Login once again as root (you might have to answer to the same questions), so that you can now install VirtualBox drivers. From the VirtualBox window, select “Install Guest Additions” under the “Devices” menu. Then, go back to your root shell and type:

mount /dev/cdrom /media
cd /media
bash VboxLinuxAdditions.run

Reboot. Your system is now ready for testing and getting started with Greenplum.
We remind you that this article must be solely intended for evaluation purposes of the community edition of Greenplum and its main features.
If you want to evaluate performance of Greenplum, we recommend you to install Greenplum on physical servers with good disk I/O performance and CPU power.
I finally want to thank Giulio Calacoci from the Italian team who accurately tested and documented the whole procedure.