Deploying the Developer Portal virtual appliance

You create a Developer Portal node by deploying the Developer Portal OVA template. After you deploy the Developer Portal OVA template, you can install the Developer Portal.

Before you begin

Before you deploy:
Note:

Ensure that your kernel or Kubernetes node has the value of its inotify watches set high enough so that the Developer Portal can monitor and maintain the files for each Developer Portal site. If set too low, the Developer Portal containers might fail to start or go into a non-ready state when this limit is reached. If you have many Developer Portal sites, or if your sites contain a lot of content, for example, many custom modules and themes, then a larger number of inotify watches are required. You can start with a value of 65,000, but for large deployments, this value might need to go up as high as 1,000,000. The Developer Portal containers take inotify watches only when they need them. The full number is not reserved or held, so it is acceptable to set this value high.

About this task

You must deploy the Developer Portal OVA template to create each Developer Portal node that you want in your cloud. Each node has a separate CLI password account that is required to log in through a Secure Shell (SSH) to complete specific administrative actions for only that node.

Important deployment information for Developer Portal:

  • You must deploy the Developer Portal OVA template by using a version of the VMware vSphere Client that supports the SHA-512 Cryptographic Hash Algorithm.
  • The Developer Portal node is initially configured with a default password of 7iron-hide, with the user name of admin. For security reasons, change the default password by completing one the following actions:
    • During deployment, if the feature is available in your VMware instance, enter a new password. If you specify a password during deployment, the password for the Developer Portal command line interface (CLI) is modified. Use the new password when you log into the CLI. You cannot modify the admin user name for the CLI.
    • After deployment, log in to the CLI for each virtual appliance and run the command to change the default password for that specific node. The CLI command is passwd.
    Note that this console uses a US keyboard configuration, in which the @ symbol can be in a different place to other keyboard configurations. If you are not using a US keyboard, ensure that you typed the password correctly.
  • Only static IP addresses that are specified during the apicup project configuration before the installation of the OVAs are supported.
  • To enable effective high availability for your Portal service, you need a latency that is less than 50ms between all OVAs to avoid the risk of performance degradation. Servers with uniform specifications are required, as any write actions occur at the speed of the slowest OVA, as the write actions are synchronous across the cluster of OVAs. It is recommended that there are three servers in each cluster of OVAs for the high availability configuration. The three servers can be situated in the same data center, or across three data centers to ensure the best availability. However, you can configure high availability with two data centers.

Procedure

Complete the following steps in order:

Note: The following steps apply to VMware only. Depending on the VMware version that you are using, some of the steps might vary. For example, you might not be able to change the user name and password during deployment.

  1. Specify configuration settings for the Developer Portal subsystem and create an ISO. See Configuring the Developer Portal subsystem
  2. Deploy the subsystem OVA into an appliance VM. See Deploying the Developer Portal subsystem OVA file.
  3. Verify the deployment. See Verifying deployment of the Developer Portal subsystem
  4. Optional: Define multiple Developer Portal endpoints. See Defining multiple portal endpoints for a VMware environment

What to do next

If you want to deploy an API Connect Analytics OVA file, continue with Deploying the Analytics subsystem.

If you did not specify a new password during deployment in VMware, then after deployment, log in to the command-line interface (CLI) for each appliance and run the command passwd to change the password.