IPLM appliance installation

Learn about installation and bringup of the Perforce appliance. The preferred method to install the Perforce IPLM platform and associated applications is via a pre-configured appliance virtual machine. The appliance VM can be downloaded and installed quickly with minimal configuration. The appliance is provided as a VDI file, and is compatible with many standard hypervisors.

The appliance image is provided without a GUI. The baseline use model is use in a remote hypervisor server environment. 

Production hardware requirements

See the Hardware for Perforce IPLM Appliance Installation page for more information.

Appliance installation

Download Perforce virtual appliance image

Open https://mdx.jfrog.io/mdx/mdx-generic/Appliance/ and download either the disk image or the OVA file.

  • Disk image:

    $ wget https://mdx.jfrog.io/mdx/mdx-generic/Appliance/mdx-iplm-c7-<version>.vmdk.gz

    $ gunzip mdx-iplm-c7-<version>.vmdk.gz

  • OVA file:

    $ wget https://mdx.jfrog.io/mdx/mdx-generic/Appliance/mdx-iplm-c7-<version>.ova

After importing the OVA file, but before booting the new VM, some hypervisors misread the OS as Operating system: Other. Change that entry to Redhat or Centos 64-bit. Sometimes those are two different items and sometimes they are in pull down lists, so select the options that make the most sense.

When specifying the hardware such as the number of CPU cores and memory, you can make an estimate based on whether it is for an evaluation or production environment. For an evaluation, usually only 2-4 cores and 4 GiB of memory are necessary. For a production deployment, between 8-12 cores and 15 GiB of memory at a minimum are necessary.

First-time bootup configuration

  1. At the login prompt in the VM console, login as root/mdxR00t

  2. Configure the network for the VM. In the VM console, run vi /etc/hostname and change it to the name of the VM (the default is mdx-iplm)

  3. In the VM console, run ifconfig -a and verify that eth0 is up. If not, make necessary changes in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/.

    Sometimes, ifconfig -a command shows that the network device name is not eth0. Use the network device name reported by ifconfig -a, including ifcfg file name.

    For example:

    # cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ens33
TYPE=Ethernet
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
NAME=ens33
DEVICE=ens33
ONBOOT=yes 
#
Reboot VM after network configuration is changed.

  4. In the VM console, run reboot if any of the network settings are changed.

Perforce software pre-installed

PiServer starts automatically after reboot. PiCli is pre-installed.

  1. Run pi to start IPLM Client.

    IPLM Webstarts automatically after reboot. IPLM Cache starts automatically after reboot. The default cache root is /picache-root.

  2. (Optional) If P4 server is password protected, run the following commands to log into P4 server:

    su - mdxadmin export P4PORT=<p4 server:port>p4 login

    The above steps are required every time the appliance reboots

  3. On the Pi client machine, run the following command to mount the IPLM Cache folder:

    sudo mount mdx-iplm:/picache-root /picache-root

    Metrics-related servers and daemons start after reboot: 

    - The Prometheus data aggregation server

    - The Grafana dashboard server

    - The Node and StatsD exporters 

    These are used to expose and display IPLM Server, Neo4j, IPLM Cache, and node metrics.

Update packages

Run the following commands to update to the latest versions

> yum update mdx-piserver mdx-picli mdx-picache mdx-metrics

Install licensing

Run the following script as root on the appliance to gather licensing info.

[root@mdx-iplm ~]# /usr/share/mdx/products/piserver/bin/mdx_gather.sh
Distro: CentOS Linux release 7.8.2003 (Core)
Collecting root block info..
BLOCK e71eecd7-8a87-4079-b679-6e9f51dd041a
Collecting IPv4 info..
IP 192.168.179.108
Please send this file to Perforce: /tmp/mdx-iplm:1600136724.txt

Additional information on licensing can be found on the Perforce IPLM Licensing page in the User Guide.

Install license

After receiving the license file, run the following commands:

> pi login admin --pw admin
> pi lic load license.txt

Configure metrics

If you want to enable Neo4j, IPLM Server, and IPLM Cache to export metrics and to bring up Perforce' metrics dashboards in Grafana, run the following command as root:

[root@mdx-iplm ~]# /usr/share/mdx/metrics/scripts/setup_metrics.sh

More information is available on the Perforce IPLM Metrics page.

Install the tutorial database

The tutorial database installation configures Perforce IPLM and Perforce (or SVN) databases in the appliance. This database is an example SOC project which can be used as an example for going through the Perforce IPLM Training and for reference when configuring internal Perforce IPLM projects. For more details on how to install the tutorial, see the Tutorial Installation for Perforce page.

Next steps

You can now add multiple users on this machine, have them source /usr/share/mdx/config/mdx.bash and they can login via pi/p4 commands, use commands line `pi ip ls` or `pi ip load` to create workspaces.

If you want to access this via a remote client machine, then they can mount the following directories:

  • /usr/share/mdx
  • /picache-root