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Manual installation

This instruction explains how to manually install the Anapaya appliance Base Image.

The appliance base image can be installed on bare metal machines or on VMs running on a hypervisor. This includes Virtual Network Functions on Extremes Universal Computing Platform (UCP). The minimal system requirements are described in the Computing resources guide.

The appliance base image is provided in three different formats:

  1. a qcow2 image
  2. a VMDK image purposed for a fast setup of VM's
  3. an ISO image that can be used to provision bare metal machines.

The images are hosted on cloudsmith.io. To download them you need to have an access token, which is provided to you by Anapaya as part of your software license.

Use the links to download the latest version of the Anapaya appliance base image for your platform.

Access token

Enter your token to generate a copyable command. Alternatively, manually set the $ACCESS_TOKEN placeholder

wget https://dl.cloudsmith.io/$ACCESS_TOKEN/anapaya/stable/raw/names/anapaya-appliance-base/versions/sys_v2.17.0-scion_v0.40.2-1/anapaya-appliance-base-sys_v2.17.0-scion_v0.40.2-1.iso

Verify that the checksum of the downloaded image matches the one documented on the release notes page.

UEFI recommended

Anapaya recommends to use UEFI images for new installations. Make sure to change the BIOS settings to UEFI boot mode on the target machine. The BIOS image is still available for legacy platforms.

Security hardening

The Anapaya appliance base image is a full system image that includes all the necessary modules to bootstrap an Anapaya appliance instance. The system image is hardened by Anapaya. However, the configuration and hardening of the host or hypervisor that hosts the Anapaya appliance is the responsibility of the user. Please refer to the corresponding vendor guidelines and best practices.

Customize with cloud-init

The Anapaya appliance can be customized using cloud-init. Refer to the cloud-init section for more details.

Install the base image on a hypervisor​

  1. Copy the qcow2 image to the hypervisor and install it according to the platform documentation.
  2. Allocate resources to the Anapaya appliance (at least 4G of RAM and 2-4 vCPUs) and then boot the VM.

Install the base image on bare metal​

Create bootable USB installer on Ubuntu​

  1. Insert a USB drive and find its device name path (e.g. /dev/sdb) by running the following command (look for type disk):

    lsblk

  2. Unmount the USB device in case it is mounted, by running:

    sudo umount /dev/<usb-dev>

  3. Burn the ISO to the USB drive

    sudo dd bs=4M if=<path-to-iso> of=/dev/<usb-dev> status=progress oflag=sync conv=fsync
Windows / macOS

If your machine is running Windows or macOS or you prefer a GUI, you can download a tool such as Etcher, to burn the ISO image to a USB drive to complete this step.

Configure the installer​

In this optional step, you can configure the installer such that no interaction is required after initiating the boot.

Create an installer configuration file with the name anapaya-user-config.yaml containing the boot disk name, and a parameter poweroff_final to make the machine power off, once the installation has been completed.

The most critical part is the disk configuration. To verify the storage deivce name you can run the following command on the target machine:

lsblk

In the generic case the disk name is sda.

disk: sda
poweroff_final: true

However, it can be different, generally they follow the naming convention sda, sdb, nvme0n1 etc. (Device Names in Linux)

For our explicitly supported devices we provide the following recommended configurations:

disk: "sda"
poweroff_final: true

There are a few more parameters that can be configured depending on your setup. Only set the listed parameters if you are sure you need to change the default value.

Advanced configuration
# Hostname: the target system's hostname.
hostname: anapaya-appliance
# Password: the password for the `anapaya` user.
password: anapaya
# InteractiveNetworkSetup: If non-interactive network setup, the installer configures IPv4 DHCP on all interfaces.
interactive_network_setup: false
# Disk: the system's disk name to install the software (default not set).
# When no disk is configured, it implies interactive storage setup which is the
# default behavior.
# Based on the disk size, the layout would be as follow:
# - < 12GB: not supported
# - < 20GB: 8GB root lvm partition, leftover space for the var lvm partition
# - < 40GB: 16GB root lvm partition, leftover space for the var lvm partition
# - >= 40GB: 24GB root lvm partition, leftover space for the var lvm partition
disk: sde
# SecondaryDisk: If a secondary disk is specified it will be used for the systems /var directory.
# The root lvm partition will use the entirety of the primary disk in this case.
secondary_disk: sdb
# PowerOffPreBoot: when `true`, it will shutdown the system before the first boot.
poweroff_preboot: false
# PowerOffFinal: when `true`, it will shutdown the system after the installation has completed.
poweroff_final: false

After the installer file is created, insert the flashed USB drive into a machine and copy the configuration file to the USB drive by following the intrustions below based on your OS.

  1. To store the base installer user configuration on the USB drive, mount the third partition of the USB device, by running:

    sudo mount /dev/<usb-dev>3 /mnt

  2. Copy the installer configuration file to the mounted partition:

    sudo cp anapaya-user-config.yaml /mnt

  3. Unmount the third partition, by running:

    sudo umount /dev/<usb-dev>3 /mnt

Boot from the installer​

Insert the USB media into the target system and initiate the boot sequence by powering on the machine.

Boot order preference

It might be necessary to change the boot order preference settings in the BIOS of the machine to favour USB devices.

If you added a configuration to the installer, the installation will start automatically, otherwise you need to select the installation target disk manually. During the installation process, the machine will restart a few times.

Check installation progress

During the final step of the installation, the OS is booted and a login prompt appears. To check the installation progress you can authenticate with the default credentials, or the credentials that were configured and run:

watch cloud-init status

After the installation has completed, the machine will conduct a final reboot or provided the poweroff_final: true config was set it shuts itself down.

Next steps​

You are now ready to provision the Anapaya appliance. A good place to start is the Setup guide. If you are already familiar with the appliance configuration, use the Appliance configuration reference to set up and configure the appliance.

Appliance licensing

Starting with release v0.38.0, appliances support Anapaya's license management system. Licenses can now be installed, but enforcement is not yet active. See Software license for more details.

Cloud-init​

The Anapaya appliance can be customized using cloud-init. This allows you to configure the appliance during the launch process, for example to set SSH keys for the anapaya user or to configure the network interfaces.

Use the following example cloud-init configuration to set the SSH keys:

#cloud-config
users:
- name: anapaya
   ssh_authorized_keys:
      - ...

Refer to the cloud-init documentation for more examples and details.

Cloud-init configuration applied afer reboot

When installing the Anapaya appliance from the ISO image, the cloud-init configuration will be applied after the second (automatic) reboot.

When installing the Anapaya appliance from the qcow2 or vmdk image, the cloud-init configuration will be applied after the first (automatic) reboot.

Only configures initial launch

Cloud-init can only be used to customize the appliance during the initial launch process. As soon as the first configuration is applied, the appliance will manage all configuration details.