please help me in getting permission to execute commands in HIVE and other application so that i can explore more with my learning. I don't think i can perform analysis on data with only having the access to HDFS.

Please help me.. plz plz plz...

Totally agree about a more flexible solution regarding lab; I generally use DC/OS in a dockerized context on a single VM or on an instance in a cloud account; mesos or yarn are great solution all included, it's very easy to install a complete big data test environment and learn the basics in a small docker context, or in a vagrant sandbox; VMware solutions should be more focused on a single virtual machine containing the whole testing framework in containers, since we're not working on performance but better on experimenting technologies.

When we are practicing big data , should be BIG to try out everything :)
..Off-course they should be on cloud.

I second the idea. Can we have a Cloud Lab option?

I fully agree. Virtual machines require very recent computers with plenty of RAM.