If you have a lot of hardware components in you laboratory best solution is setting up a local controller running as virtual machine hosted on your virtualization server or, even better, as a standalone system on bare metal.
Sometimes scenario could be quite different. One of the possibilities is lab which contains only virtual machines settled on public cloud and additional device outside cloud operator infrastructure is additional complication. Second is situation when you have only few devices and you can’t, or don’t want to, buy, setup and configure dedicated server.
In this case best option is using virtual controller settled in cloud. This tutorial presents how to create one in few simple steps in AWS cloud.
To create virtual EspressoLabs controller you have to have valid Amazon Web Services account and have basic knowledge about creation and management of EC2 instances.
Remember that in AWS you pay per use. We are not responsible for any fees which you have to pay for using virtual controller in cloud environment. If you run instance for testing purposes it is good idea to stop, or even terminate, it after end of use.
Remember also that in some cases you have to pay not only for when machine working but also for data transfer. If you use controller to connect with RDP or VNC it could generate bigger amount of transferred data than in case of SSH or Telnet.
First step when you want create new instance is clicking Launch instance button in AWS EC2 console dashboard.
You will be redirected to list of available AMIs (Amazon Machine Image). You have to chose from left panel section named Community AMIs and then search image id (most current is ami-e118180b) with search field. You should see in description the it is Canned Coffee Espresso Labs Controller.
At this moment this AMI is available only in eu-west-1 region so you have to set current region to EU (Ireland) by selecting it from drop down list placed in upper right corner of AWS Console.
Then you have to select proper instance type. For testing purposes t2.micro should be enough. If you have to serve access to dozens devices mainly with graphical desktops larger one should be used.
Next few steps could be skipped by clicking Review and Launch. It’s almost done. Now, during Review Instance Launch, you have to check if all options are elected properly and use Launch button.
Access to controller is possible only with user and password credentials so you have to change during key pair selection process to option named Process without a key pair.
Now you have to wait few minutes before controller instance will be launched.
If everything ends you will see new EC2 instance in your dashboard. You could connect to controller with SSH client. To get initial access use following credentials:
- user: administrator
- password: elabpassword
Now you could configure and register your controller. Full process is described in documentation available here.
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