Evaluate MapR using a flat storage file instead of formatting disks

For evaluation, you can use a flat storage file instead of formatting disks.

About this task

When setting up a small cluster for evaluation purposes, if a particular node does not have physical disks or partitions available to dedicate to the cluster, you can use a flat file on an existing disk partition as the node's storage. Create at least a 16GB file, and include a path to the file in the disk list file for the disksetup script.

The following example creates a 20 GB flat file (bs=1G specifies 1 gigabyte blocks, multiplied by count=20) at /root/storagefile:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/storagefile bs=1G count=20
Add the created flat file to the disk list file /tmp/disks.txt to be used by disksetup:
/root/storagefile