How many nodes should be installed for a minimal cluster?

[#1]

Hi! I am writing diploma "Learning Big data services". I would like to create a simple minimal cluster to test/learn work of different services (e.g. Hive). Let's suppose that i am not going to process huge amount of data. How many virtual machines should i have to configure environment and test some Hive features?

[#2]

@Daria 

Ideally a 4 node cluster is good enough to setup locally with VirtualBox in a local environment to test various features in a HDFS/Yarn HA Enabled cluster. 

However, if you want to quickly test some features in a single host machine then you can also have a look at the HDP Sandbox. 
https://www.cloudera.com/downloads/hortonworks-sandbox/hdp.html

[#3]

@Daria 

In addition to @jsensharma  update, you can also refer to below documentation for a cluster hardware requirement and for Cloudera Reference Architecture

https://docs.cloudera.com/documentation/enterprise/6/release-notes/topics/rg_hardware_requirements.h...

https://docs.cloudera.com/documentation/other/reference-architecture.html