AWS EC2 Installation

An AWS EC2 configuration example is shown in the figure below. We offer an Ansible script for quick and easy AWS installation. Further below are the installation instructions.

Installation Steps

Prerequisites

The Ansible script described below can be executed from any Linux machine that has access to your AWS account. Once ran, the script will create a flexiWAN instance on your AWS account. Please note that the script will not install flexiWAN on the device you’re running it from, it will create a new instances on AWS.

Before starting the installation process, make sure you have the following things:

1. An Amazon EC2 account for installing the flexiEdge device

2. An Ansible environment on your Linux machine.

   If you are running under Ubuntu 18.04 you can install it by:

   sudo apt update
   sudo apt install software-properties-common
   sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible
   sudo apt update
   sudo apt install ansible python-boto3 python3-boto3 python-boto python3-boto
   

   When using Ubuntu 21.10 or newer, run the following commands:

   sudo apt update
   sudo apt install software-properties-common
   sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible
   sudo apt-get install python3-pip
   sudo pip3 install boto
   sudo apt install ansible
   

3. A valid AWS_ACCESS_KEY and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY.

   The keys can be found in the IAM management console of Amazon EC2. More information on how to find and update the access keys is detailed here

Installation

1. Download the Ansible script

   mkdir ansible
   cd ansible
   wget https://sandbox.flexiwan.com/Utils/ansible.v0.1.6.tar.gz
   

2. Unzip the tar.gz:

   tar -vxf ansible.v0.1.6.tar.gz
   cd ansible.v0.1.4/
   

3. Export the AWS_ACCESS_KEY and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY

   export AWS_ACCESS_KEY=**********************
   export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=***********************************************
   

4. Run the Ansible script to create your AWS flexiEdge device

   Use the following parameters in the script command line:

   Ansible parameters

   Parameter	Description
   region	Region in Amazon EC2 used for creating the flexiEdge device
   vpc_name	A string for naming the VPC
   vpc_cidr_block	The CIDR for the VPC. Note: This should be a globally unique CIDR, as our goal is to create a tunnel between VPCs
   cidr_lan	The CIDR for the LAN network
   lan_ip_address	The LAN IP address
   flexiwan_token	The organization token created in your flexiManage account
   stack	A sting for tagging the resource in EC2

   Example: the following command creates a VPC in Ohio region (us-east-2), the LAN and WAN subnets, the Internet Gateway and one m5.large EC2 instance with Ubuntu 18.04 and the flexiEdge software (as shown in the figure above). Once the script completes successfully, a new flexiEdge device should appear in the flexiManage Devices menu automatically. The SSH key to access the EC2 instance is saved in the directory under the string name used for the stack parameter.

   ansible-playbook ec2_create_customer.yml --extra-vars "region=us-east-2 vpc_name=VPC vpc_cidr_block=172.18.0.0/16 cidr_lan=172.18.1.0/24 cidr_wan=172.18.254.0/24 lan_ip_address=172.18.1.254 flexiwan_token=ey****** stack=Ohio"
   

5. To access the instance via SSH

   SSH with your key, and the public IP allocated for the flexiEdge device

   ssh -i Ohio -l ubuntu 13.53.107.28