Chapter 1. Installing Red Hat CloudForms

Red Hat CloudForms is able to be installed and ready to configure in a few quick steps. After downloading Red Hat CloudForms as a virtual machine image template from the Red Hat Customer Portal, the installation process takes you through the steps of uploading the appliance to a supported virtualization or cloud provider.

Important

After installing the Red Hat CloudForms appliance, you must configure the database for Red Hat CloudForms. See Section 2.3, “Configuring a Database for Red Hat CloudForms”.

1.1. Obtaining the Appliance

  1. Go to access.redhat.com and log in to the Red Hat Customer Portal using your customer account details.
  2. Click Downloads in the menu bar.
  3. Click A-Z to sort the product downloads alphabetically.
  4. Click Red Hat CloudForms → Download Latest to access the product download page.
  5. From the list of installers and images, select the Google Compute Engine download link.

1.2. Uploading the Appliance on Google Compute Engine

When the Red Hat CloudForms Google Compute Engine appliance has finished downloading to your system, upload the appliance with the following steps:

  1. Log in to the Google Cloud Platform dashboard.
  2. Click on Home in the top left of the screen.
  3. Click GCE products services to show the Products and Services menu. Click Storage.

  4. Create a bucket by clicking Create Bucket, and configure the following details:

    1. Enter a unique Name for the bucket using lower case alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and/or underscores.
    2. Configure your location from the dropdown list.
    3. Click Create.
  5. Click Upload Files and browse to the location of the Red Hat CloudForms Google Compute Engine appliance you downloaded. Select the tar.gz file on your local machine, and click Open to begin the upload.
  6. When the upload is complete, click GCE products services Products & services → Compute Engine on the left menu.

  7. Create an image by clicking Images from the left menu, then Create Image. Fill in the following details about the image:

    1. Enter a unique Name for the image using lower case alphanumeric characters and/or hyphens.
    2. Add a Description if desired.
    3. Configure Encryption if desired. This defaults to Automatic (recommended).
    4. In Source, use the dropdown to select Cloud Storage file. This shows the Cloud Storage file field.
    5. In Cloud Storage file, click Browse to bring up the Select object window. Select the bucket containing the image you uploaded and click the > symbol to locate the tar.gz image inside the bucket. Select the image and click Select.
    6. Click Create. Creating the image will take a few minutes. When the image is created, the screen will refresh and the new image will appear in the Images list.

  8. Create a virtual machine instance by navigating to VM instances → Create Instance, and configure the following fields:

    1. Enter a unique Name for the virtual machine instance using lower case alphanumeric characters and/or hyphens.
    2. Select the Zone closest to your location.
    3. Under Boot disk, click Change to bring up the Boot disk window. Click the Your Image tab and select the disk you previously created. Click Select.
    4. Under Firewall, select the check box for Allow HTTPS traffic.
    5. Click GCE ManagementSSHkeys Management, disk, networking, SSH keys. Then, click the SSH Keys tab, add your entire SSH public key data in the Username box.
    6. Configure any other fields as desired, and click Create.

Your new virtual machine instance, as well as the external IP address for accessing the Red Hat CloudForms interface, appears under VM instances.