Azure HDInsight now available in the Azure Preview Portal

Today, we are announcing Azure HDInsight will be available in the Azure Preview Portal in addition to the existing Azure portal.

The Azure Preview Portal was announced last year and delivers a reimagined management portal simplifying resource management, providing integrated billing and offering a rich gallery of applications and services. By providing Azure HDInsight in the Preview Portal, you also gain access to the Azure Resource Manager framework (ARM) which includes:

• New and updated tools like the portal interface, PowerShell cmdlets and new .NET SDK packages. The PowerShell cmdlets and .NET SDK packages will be available later this week.
• Resource Groups will allow you to deploy groups of resources and control who can manage and create resources in your subscription.

For more information on the Azure Resource Manager framework (ARM), see the framework documentation here.

To get started with HDInsight in the Azure Preview Portal, follow these easy steps:

1) Visit the Azure Preview Portal (https://portal.azure.com)

2) Create a new cluster: Click New then navigate to Data + Analytics

3) To view your clusters, click Browse All.

Other features of the new portal:

• Common operations like scaling your cluster are easy to find at the top of the cluster overview screen.
• You will see a convenient price breakdown when creating or scaling your cluster.
• Cluster dashboards are available on the Cluster Dashboards tile on the cluster overview screen.
  • Cluster dashboards include the Query Console for Hadoop clusters, Ambari Web for Linux clusters, and the Zeppelin and Jupyter notebooks for Spark clusters.

Important things to note:

With the availability of HDInsight in the new Preview portal, there are a few changes:

a) Cluster identification changes

• Clusters created with the new tools are now identified as Azure Resource Manager framework (ARM) clusters.
  • They are identified by their cluster name and resource group name (ex: “contoso-hadoop-cluster1” in a resource group called “costosobigdata”).
  • They are not visible or manageable with previous tools, like the previous portal.
• Clusters created with older tools are now identified as Azure Service Management (ASM) clusters.
  • All existing clusters are ASM clusters.
  • Your ASM clusters will automatically be assigned to a new, unique resource group (ex: “hdinsight587493872-West-US”).

b) New default sizes for Azure Resource Manager framework (ARM) clusters in the Preview Portal

Based on learnings from running Azure HDInsight, we are changing the default node sizes for Azure HDInsight determined by the workload you are trying to run (Hadoop, HBase, Storm, or Spark). This will give customers an optimal experience running different workloads with characteristics that might need more cores, RAM or disk size. You can also change the VM type from the default to something more specifically suited to your needs.

For more information about each size, please see Azure HDInsight’s pricing page.

c) Roadmap for the tooling for Azure Resource Manager framework (ARM) and Azure Service Management(ASM) clusters

• Starting now, new features and improvements for the tooling will only be available for Azure Resource Manager framework (ARM) tools.
• Eventually, the Azure Service Management(ASM) tools will be removed. We encourage you to familiarize yourself with the new ARM tools moving forward.
• The new ARM tools can manage ASM and ARM clusters. The ASM tools can only manage ASM clusters.