Works on different VM/physical, cloud hardware

In case you want to do a scalability based on the VMware architecture, the way to go will be VMware vSphere™ Big Data Extensions:

The benefits to do this are phenomenal, which we can list as follows:

• Rapid provisioning: Virtualization allows very sophisticated facilities like cloning, templates, resource allocation and optimizations, speed of deployment. A large scale distributed Hadoop/HBase cluster which is deployed on multiple nodes and can scale on demand and downscale as needed.
• High Availability (HA) and Fault Tolerance: By design hadoop/HBase ecosystem comes with HA as the underlying layer is HDFS but some of the core components of the system like namenode, HBase master, secondary namenode, jobtracker becomes single point of failure. VM Ware provides very advanced underlying technology, which can help us do this by using vSphere and vMotion.
• Datacenter efficiency: It can be achieved by using the infrastructure flexibly or elastically...