While the cloud has been an important focus for VMware, the virtualization company hasn’t fallen behind the big data curve either.  And Project Serengeti is playing an increasingly important role in this initiative as the open-source solution that allows enterprises to run Hadoop on vSphere, taking full advantage of virtualization with easier provisioning and high availability.

This week VMware unveiled the latest release for the project, which comes with several major improvements. Application Infrastructure CTO Richard McDougall made the announcement in an official blog post.

One of the main highlights is the extended supported for other platforms: Cloudera CDH3u3, Greenplum GPHD 1.2.0.0, Hortonworks HW 1.0.7, and Apache 1.0.1. This underscores a very important point that McDougall made in his article:

“Rarely do I just see Hadoop. It’s always a mix of different application types. The other types of applications that complement Hadoop should be able to share the same cluster as Hadoop, but may leverage existing application deployment and management frameworks, such as those provided by virtual infrastructure.”

Serengeti’s bottom line is to make better use of IT resources in Hadoop deployments, and the newest version adds a few more features that augment this role. Users can now leverage the framework to configure infrastructure topologies and tune Hadoop itself; placement controls have been added for physical nodes and the I/O interface has been improved. To top it all off, Serengeti now installs with brand new UI courtesy of the developer community.

Hadoop is not a standalone platform, and VMware is not the first to have figured a strategy that incorporates the array of popular open-source platforms.  Hortonworks recently launched a Hive connector that provides a data uplink to Excel, PowerPivot, Tableau virtualization software and a long list of other database solutions.  The integration allows data scientists to analyze and visualize information without having to move it around manually, thus greatly increasing productivity.