After uploading the airgap server OVA to the local file server, deploy the airgap server in the VMware Telco Cloud Automation environment.

Prerequisites

To use the airgap server in the VMware Telco Cloud Automation system, you must configure a DNS server for resolving the airgap server domain name. This DNS server is useful when deploying VMware Tanzu Kubernetes clusters.

Procedure

  1. Use the OVA that you imported into the local file system and deploy the airgap server virtual machine on the target Internet-restricted environment.
  2. Power on the virtual machine and log into it.
  3. To prepare the system for the target environment, define the environment-related parameters in the user-input.yml file and run the Ansible Playbook. In the deploy phase, use the deploy-user-inputs.yml as a template for storing customization parameters. The customization parameters include:
    • Network adapter IP address.
    • FQDN of the airgap server.
    • Certificate updates.
    • Clear unused settings such as proxy, Harbor service ports, and password.
      Note: The Harbor password in the deploy-user-inputs.yml file does not work when setting up a new Harbor repository as Harbor does not support changing the password after setting up for the first time. The Harbor password that you set here must be the same as the one in the user-inputs.yml file. The purpose of keeping this input here is for Harbor login validation only. 
    root@photon-machine [ ~/airgap/scripts/vars ]# ls
deploy-user-inputs.yml setup-user-inputs.yml
root@photon-machine [ ~/airgap/scripts/vars ]# cp deploy-user-inputs.yml user-inputs.yml
root@photon-machine [ ~/airgap/scripts/vars ]# vi user-inputs.yml
    The deploy-user-inputs.yml file at scripts/vars provides an example of the required inputs in the deployment phase. You can copy it to your user-inputs.yml file and modify according to your environment requirement.
  4. To customize the airgap server, run the deploy.yml file. 
    root@photon-machine [ ~/airgap ]# scripts/bin/run.sh deploy

Results

You can lose connection if Ansible Playbook changes the IP address on eth0. If you lose connection, log back in and verify the ansible.log file for changes. During deployment, the airgap server does not synchronize its repository from the Internet. Hence, it takes only a few minutes for completing the customizations.