Deploying Stingray Traffic Manager virtual appliance on VMware ESX

In this video goes over how to deploy the Stingray Traffic Manager virtual appliance onto VMware ESX. The first thing you want to do is go to Riverbed.com and select Stingray product family from the products and services menu at the top, from there click on the free Stingray download link and fill out the registration form. After completing the registration form click Submit and you'll receive an email with the evaluation key, which is good for four weeks and gives the full feature set and performance of Stingray along with access to Stingray technical support. Download the software and install it without the evaluation key in developer mode. In developer mode, Stingray is limited to one megabit/second of bandwidth throughput but can be upgraded later with the evaluation key when it arrives. Click on the link under Stingray Traffic Manager and you'll be taken to a page with different flavours of Stingray available to download, from a peer software installer to virtual appliances for different virtualization platforms. Download the VMware OVF, when it's done, open up vSphere, go to File and deploy all VF templates, click on browse and navigate to the directory where the file is. The file will be a zip file so to see it click on all files in the bottom right corner and then right click on the file and then click on extract all. Unzip the file, once it finishes extracting click through the newly created directories and select the .OVF file. Click Next again to accept the license and name the appliance, select the data store you want to store it in and select if you want a thick or thin provisioning and keep the network parameters the same and click Finish. After it finishes deploying, upgrade the virtual hardware, this will allow us to use VMX NET 3 network adapter which has advanced features. Right-click on the virtual appliance and click upgrade virtual hardware, the Stingray virtual appliance comes pre-configured with the single NIC of type VMX NET, change that to a VMX NET 3 and add two additional network adapters. Right click on the Stingray virtual appliance and select Edit Settings, selecting the preconfigured network adapter we can see that it's of type VMX NET, remove that network adapter here and navigate over to the Options tab. What we'll do is temporarily change the type of Linux from either Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, either 64-bit or 32-bit, because the VMX NET 3 network adapter won't show up if the type of Linux is other Linux. Right clicking on Edit Settings, click on add and select Ethernet adapter from the list clicking on next, change the type to VMX NET 3 and set the network label, we'll select management network, click Finish to save. Repeat that same process twice to create network adapters for both the public and the server networks. The Stingray virtual appliance comes pre-configured with one virtual CPU and 2 GB of RAM it's recommended to increase the number of virtual CPU to 2 for most workloads and more if you're doing CPU intensive tasks, 2 GB of RAM should be sufficient for most workloads. But if you expect to have a lot of content that needs to be cached on Stingray, it's a good idea to upgrade the RAM to 4 and change the operating system type back to other Linux. For production systems it's recommended to reserve the amount of memory Stingray has been configured with, navigate to the resource allocation tab, right click on the Stingray virtual appliance and click Edit resource settings under the memory resources section, slide the reservation slider as far right as it will go and click OK to save, now we can power on the Stingray virtual appliance. Click on the console tab and wait for the appliance to boot up, you'll see a screen similar to this with the URL that you can use to access the administration interface and perform the initial configuration wizard. The IP address here is assigned to 8-0 first based on DHCP and if DHCP times out 8-0 is assigned 192.168.1.101, if the IP address assigned to 8-0 does not match what you want it to be, press ALT + F2 to log into the console with the username and password of admin and make sure that the 8-0 is assigned to the management network, execute an IF Config in the console and press Control ALT to escape back into ESX. Right click on the virtual appliance and click Edit Settings, move the window over to the left so we can see the hardware address and click on the network adapter corresponding to the management network and ensure the mac address matches with the 8-0. Do the same for the other network adapters so the Ethernet adapters in Linux match the network adapters in ESX, you can tehn execute a Z-set initial address to change the IP address of 8-0 and open up a web browser to the URL specified and the Stingray console to begin the initial configuration wizard.