Serengeti is an open source project initiated by VMware to enable the rapid deployment of an Apache Hadoop cluster HDFS, MapReduce, Pig, Hive, .. on a virtual platform.

Serengeti 0.5 currently supports vSphere, with the ability to support other platforms. The project is at an early stage, and is endorsed by all major Hadoop distributions including Cloudera, Greenplum, Hortonworks and MapR.

via Project Serengeti.