Run the Edge Router VM on Your Own Equipment
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Introduction

This install guide will walk you through the steps required to launch a NetFoundry Edge Router VM on your private cloud VM stack e.g. VMware, Virtualbox; and assumes you have already created the Edge Router in your NetFoundry network and captured the registration one-time key. We will refer to this VM in some places as the virtual customer premises equipment (vCPE).

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How it Works

Data sessions inside your NetFoundry Network are established outbound from your on-premises Edge Router VM to your dedicated, hosted Edge Routers in NetFoundry data centers. The return path of the data session is utilized to receive data from the Endpoints in your NetFoundry network. As a result, inbound firewall configuration is generally not required for full functionality. This method is similar to STUN/TURN.

See Edge Gateway Sizing Guide for information on sizing your gateway VM for required throughput.

When to Contact Customer Support

The VM is configured to work with a single virtual network adapter. Please consult with customer support if your requirements include a VM with multiple interfaces (multi-homed), IP forwarding/routing for an attached subnet, or high availability.

Get the VM

Select your desired VM stack from the NetFoundry Downloads page:

VMware: VMDK disk, VMware specific ovf file. open-vm-tools is installed.
Virtualbox: VMDK disk, VirtualBox specific ovf file.
KVM: QCOW2 disk with README file
Hyper-V: Gen1 VHD disk with README file
RAW: compressed .img disk image

Register the VM

If your VM stack provides a way to run a script on first boot you may use something like this, substituting your own registration key:

#!/bin/bash
/opt/netfoundry/router-registration {key}
yum clean metadata && yum update -y

In the NetFoundry console, confirm the Edge Router is REGISTERED within ten minutes. If you are unable to inject a first boot script then you may log in after first boot and manually run the same commands.

Advanced Registration Parameters

In the above example we used the most simple form of the router-registration command. Know more about the registration command and the parameters available for special cases such as configuring transit link listeners in How to Register the Edge Router VM. The default username and password are "nfadmin" and, depending on your VM stack, it may be necessary to authenticate with the SSH pubkey you provided to the stack when you created the VM.

Network Adapter Settings

The VM is running CentOS and contains configuration for a single interface, called "eth0", depending on VM stack. If you add another interface, it will follow the naming schema "eth[n]", where [n] is incremented numerically, depending on your VM stack.

CentOS provides an easy interface called "Network Manager Text User Interface" that can be used to configure the local interfaces.

Launch the tool by running

> sudo nmtui

Modify IP/Network/Routes/DNS/etc configurations as needed for each network interface.

Requirements

You MUST have a valid IP gateway and DNS configuration for registration to succeed.
If assigning a static IP within the "Edit Connection" screen of "nmtui", you must use CIDR notation to also specify the network prefix. For example, "10.1.1.4/24" means the IP address is 10.1.1.4 with a 255.255.255.0 netmask. If you do not include the network prefix, the system will assume it to be /32. Refer to this TechTarget article for more information.

Firewall Requirements

Firewall requirements are further detailed in Create and Manage Edge Routers.

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1 comment

James Lin
November 02, 2018 19:15

Most of the step: "Step 3: VTC & firewalld configuration for multi-nic deployments" has to be run as root, or have "sudo" in front of the commands.

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