Support FAQ 378 | Deploying VMCS in a cloud as a virtual appliance

Deploying VMCS in a cloud as a virtual appliance

Opengear's VCMS virtual central management appliance can be run as a guest under Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (or under a VMware ESX/ESXi or VMware Server). The host may be a physical machine that you administer, a managed server or a cloud hosting service from a hosting provider. This FAQ examines deployment in a hosted KVM environment.

The VCMS requires resources of at least a 500MHz CPU core, 256MB RAM and 4GB disk space (which is well below the minimum you will generally provided by a hosted service). In addition, the following virtual devices are required:

Disk device SATA (VMware) or IDE (Linux KVM)
E1000 compatible Ethernet NIC, bridged

The Opengear VCMS is released as a firmware upgrade file (*.bin) and a full image (*.gz). The full image is used for the initial deployment. Firmware upgrade files are used thereafter for upgrades.

The full disk image you deploy for Linux KVM is vcms-x.y.z-kvm.hdd.gz. You will need to uncompress the full image using gunzip, Winzip or similar before deployment.

The upgrade file you use for Linux KVM is vcms-x.y.z-kvm.bin.

You can download mages and upgrades from http://www.opengear.com/firmware/. These are fully featured images which can be used freely for evaluation and for non-commercial purposes. License keys for commercial use are provided by your Opengear sales channel.

To install follow the instructions provided by your virtualization management suite to deploy the hdd file as appropriate.

Example of KVM cloud deployment using ElasticHosts

Browse to http://www.elastichosts.com and create an account at your preferred peer location
- You may wish to use the 5 day free hosting trial, otherwise add a subscription that meets the reserved resource requirements outlined under System Requirements in this document
- Ensure you set 'Committed data transfer' to 10 GB or higher and/or have a pre-pay balance to cover monthly data transfer. Data usage by VCMS will vary with usage patterns, but will generally not be heavy
- We recommend you purchase a static IP address, otherwise you must also configure CMS to use a dynamic DNS service.
Upload vcms-x.y.z-kvm.hdd as a drive using any of the methods described in http://www.elastichosts.com/cloud-hosting/faq#uploadQ
If you are deploying from a Linux or POSIX compliant system, we recommend using the drive upload tool script: http://www.elastichosts.com/downloads/elastichosts-upload.sh Your secret API key is available on your Profile page: export EHAUTH="xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
Your API endpoint URI is the hostname of account's peer location, proceeded by "api.", e.g. for San Antonio Peer 1: export EHURI=https://api.sat-p.elastichosts.com/
After setting these in your environment, run: ./elastichosts-upload.sh vcms-x.y.z-kvm.hdd
From the Elastic Hosts Control Panel:
- Select Server in 'Add server or drive'. Enter a Name, e.g. "VCMS".
- Select the Type of 'Boot from existing drive'.
- Select the Drive you uploaded in the previous step, e.g. "vcms-x.y.z-kvm.hdd".
- Click Add.
- Click Edit on the Server you have just added. Select the static IP address to use if available, and set the VNC password.
- Click Start.

Deployment is now complete. You can now monitor the VCMS boot progress using VNC, or proceed to the next step to begin configuration.

Once VCMS has been deployed and the virtual appliance has booted, CMS configuration is performed by browsing to the IP address of the virtual NIC. The virtual NIC obtains an address using DHCP and has a static IP address of 192.168.0.1 The default login is root:default

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