I recently spent a few hours installing a cluster of 3 Aruba ClearPass Policy Manager virtual appliances and, for future reference, decided to document the escapade here. If you can get something out of it too, all the better!

When I complete the configuration setup I’ll be posting more…stay tuned!

Getting Started

Download the OVS virtual appliance files from Aruba’s support site, and work with the virtualization team to get the new appliance(s) deployed to the proper location in your vSphere environment. The screenshots below are from vSphere 5.5.

Once the virtual appliances are deployed on the correct vlans/port groups, login to vCenter using the vSphere client and open the Virtual Machine Properties. When my VMs were deployed there was only 1 hard disk but it requires two. Add a second hard disk if it isn’t there already. Here I selected 100GB thin provisioned, but I believe the Aruba documentation may say to use Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed (I’m guessing for better performance later on).

After you’ve applied any necessary changes, open a console session in the vSphere client and power up the VM for the first time.

As it boots you’ll see a bunch of startup information fly by.

This is one of the only times you need to intervene in the install process. Hit the letter Y (or y) to verify you want to destroy all data on the second disk.

The installation process then begins to set up partitions.

I ended up seeing some errors along the way but as this is for a lab I’m not losing any sleep over it. Yet.

Loading plugins takes a while. If you don’t already have something to drink, lock your screen and walk away for a bit.

Hooray! All plugins loaded! Services starting up:

At long last, the CLI login screen!

Login with the ClearPass default CLI credentials “appadmin” and “eTIPS123”. Then we get to the configuration wizard. Extra points for you if you noticed that our VM apparently vMotioned since the last step.

We don’t use a separate Data Port in our setup, so I just hit ENTER to leave that field blank.

Next comes time and date configuration. You can use an NTP source or just set it manually. I used NTP.

We don’t use FIPS mode.

Configuration summary shows all the selections made during the wizard. Hit Y to continue.

The settings get applied, then services are restarted and you get the CLI login back:

That’s it for now…stay tuned for a continuation of this post to include more detailed setup.

Any pointers for me in setting up Virtual Clearpass for production? Please share with the rest of the folks! Questions? Hit me up in the comments or on Twitter (@swackhap).