If you get the VM, it has all the tools already installed.  Best to try it out on your own machine(s) first before paying the big bucks to Amazon.  For the record, its not really EC2 that costs a ton, its the storage that nips you in the butt.<p><a href="http://www.cloudera.com/hadoop-training-virtual-machine" rel="nofollow">http://www.cloudera.com/hadoop-training-virtual-machine</a>