Provision Service Point v4 in GCP - BlueCat Edge - Service Point v4.x.x

BlueCat Edge Deployment Guide

Locale
English
Product name
BlueCat Edge
Version
Service Point v4.x.x

This section gives detailed instructions for provisioning Service Point v4 in GCP.

Before you begin:

DNS resolver configurations

When provisioning your service point in GCP, BlueCat recommends configuring the service point to use the default cloud DNS resolver. When the service point is provisioned in GCP, the primary DNS resolver is 168.254.169.254.

Registering the Service Point v4 image on GCP:
  1. Log in to your GCP account.
  2. In the GCP portal, select the GCP project that will be used to provision a Service Point v4 VM.
  3. Navigate to the GCP public disk storage. The public disk storage contains all available versions of the Service Point v4 image that can be provisioned.
    Note: You must be logged in to GCP to access the link.
  4. Select the version that you would like to provision and click the object to navigate to the Object Details page.
  5. Within the gsutil URI field, copy the name of the Service Point v4 image that you would like to provision without the gs:// prefix. The value of the field is in the following format:
    gs://bluecat-dns-edge-fleet-service-point/edge-service-point-v<VERSION>.vmdk
    Where the <VERSION> is the version of the Service Point v4 image.
    Note: Save the value of this field, as it will be used in a later step.
  6. Navigate back to the GCP portal and search for Compute Engine.
  7. Within the Compute Engine page, select Images > Create Image.
  8. Enter the name of the image. The name must start with a lowercase letter followed by up to 62 lowercase letters, numbers, or hyphens. The name cannot end with a hyphen.
  9. Under Source, select Virtual disk (VMDK, VHD).
  10. Paste the value that was previously copied from the gsutil URI field without the gs:// prefix. For example, the value should look similar to the following:
    bluecat-dns-edge-fleet-service-point/edge-service-point-v<VERSION>.vmdk
  11. Select Debian Bullseye as the Operating system on virtual disk.
  12. Disable the Install guest packages checkbox.
  13. Press Create.
    Attention: When you provision the Service Point v4 instance in GCP, it is provisioned using the VPC named default. This VPC is automatically created when you create a new GCP project.
    If your GCP project does not contain the default VPC, the image fails to be provisioned; however, you can provision the Service Point v4 instance with a custom VPC name using the following gcloud CLI command:
    gcloud compute images import <image-name> \
    --source-file=gs://bluecat-dns-edge-fleet-service-point/edge-service-point-v<VERSION>.vmdk \
    --no-guest-environment \
    --os=debian-11 \
    --network=<vpc-name> \
    --subnet=<subnet-name>

    For more information on the gcloud CLI, refer to https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud.

GCP imports the selected Service Point v4 image. The import can take approximately 15 minutes.

Provisioning Service Point v4 on GCP:
  1. Once the image has been created in GCP, click the image and select Create Instance.
  2. Within the Basic section, enter the following information:
    • Enter the Name of the virtual machine.
    • Select a Region and Zone in which the virtual machine will be deployed.
    • Select the Machine Family to use for the virtual machine. BlueCat recommends selecting E2 Custom (4CPUs/8GB).
  3. Within the Networking section, enter the following information:
    • (Optional): If you have firewall rules based on network tags, add them within this page.
      Ensure that your network is configured for the following ports and protocols to be opened on the Service Point v4 VM in GCP:
      • Port 22 (TCP)—used for SSH connections.
      • Port 53 (TCP and UDP)—used for DNS service.
      • Port 2021 (TCP)—used for DNS resolver service diagnostics.
      • Port 8083 (TCP)—used for Service Point v4 telemetry APIs.
    Attention: Service Point v4 does not support changing IP addresses once the VM has been created.
  4. Within the Management section, enter the following information:
    • Add a Metadata field with the key set as user-data. Within the value, paste the contents of the configuration file that you downloaded from the Service points (v4) configuration page or paste the content that was copied to the clipboard if you selected the Copy configuration to clipboard button from the Service points (v4) configuration page.
    • Add a Metadata field with the key set as user-data-encoding and value set as base64.
      Note: If you selected the Copy configuration to clipboard button after creating the service point in the Edge Cloud Instance, paste the content into the user-data value and do not add the user-data-encoding metadata field.
    • Add a Metadata field with the key set as serial-port-enable and value set as TRUE.
  5. Click Create.

Once you have provisioned the Service Point v4 VM, you can deploy DNS resolver service. For more information, refer to DNS resolver services.

Attention: You can use the Service Point v4 telemetry APIs to verify that the Service Point v4 VM has successfully registered. The registrationStatus field within the Service Point v4 telemetry API response returns a value of REGISTERED when the Service Point v4 VM has successfully registered with the BlueCat Edge Cloud. If the value is not REGISTERED, this may indicate that there is an issue with the service point provisioning and the service point may not operate as intended.

For more information on the Service Point v4 telemetry APIs, refer to Service Point v4 Telemetry APIs.