Microsoft Azure is a cloud solution that allows one to rent, compute, and store resources on-demand for the duration of a project. HDInsight is a service that utilizes these elastic services and allows us to quickly create a Hadoop cluster for big data processing. HDInsight cluster is completely integrated with low-cost Blob storage and allows other programs to directly leverage data in Blob storage.

Microsoft HDInsight Emulator for Azure is a single node Hadoop cluster with key components installed and configured that is great for development, initial prototyping, and promoting code to production cluster.

HDInsight Emulator requires a 64-bit version of Windows and one of the following operating systems will suffice: Windows 7 Service Pack 1, Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack1, Windows 8, or Windows Server 2012.

HDP for Windows can be deployed on multiple servers. With this option, you have complete control over the servers and can scale as per your project needs in your own data center. This option, however, does not have the additional value added features provided by HDInsight.

HDP 2.2 requires a 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2012.