Cloudmersive Private Cloud Best Practices for On-Premises Deployment

Overview

Cloudmersive Private Cloud natively supports On-Premises deployment, either on bare metal or in a virtual machine environment (e.g. VMware, Hyper-V, or equivalent). Follow these best practices to facillitate a great installation experience.

General Approach

In general, follow the instructions in the Cloudmersive management portal under Private Cloud Deployment. Extend those instructions with these best practices.

Choosing the Right Virtual Machine or Physical Hardware Configuration

When creating your machine instance, we recommend 4 cores or 2 cores or higher/equivalent. Be sure that your machine instance has at least 16 GB of RAM. When choosing the operating system, be sure to choose Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Base (with operating system Microsoft Windows 2016 Datacenter edition. [English] 64-bit). Be sure to set the OS disk to 200 GB or larger. For OS disk type, SSD is recommended but not required. We recommend but do not require enabling volume encryption. Under Networking we recommend allowing the ports for RDP (3389) and HTTP (80) or HTTPS (443). For the installation, connect to the instance over Remote Desktop (RDP). Ensure that the instance has outbound connectivity as described in the instructions. We strongly recommend assigning all IP addresses as static.

Before Installation (Required)

After provisioning your machine instances but prior to running the installation, navigate to each node in your Cloudmersive Private Cloud installation in the management portal under Private Cloud Deployment and click on Configure Node. Under External Node Address, copy and paste the IPv4 IP address of your virtual machine on the network. Under Internal Node Address, copy and paste the same value. If you are using a NAT or load balancer, use the IP address of the machine, not its external IP address. If you are using an outbound proxy (not common in AWS), check the box for Enable Proxy Server for Outbound Traffic and specify the proxy server. Click Save Changes.

We also recommend disabling automatic Windows Update restarts in Windows Server 2016, and also disabling Windows Defender automatic scanning.

Outbound Proxy Endpoint Whitelisting

If your company limits outbound network traffic based on a proxy server or requires outbound IP endpoint whitelisting, whitelist all of these endpoints prior to starting the installation:

  • https://cloudmersive.com
  • https://account.cloudmersive.com
  • https://servicecore.cloudmersive.com
  • https://virusdefinitions.cloudmersive.com
  • https://privatecloud.cloudmersive.com
  • https://927861292015.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
  • https://ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
  • https://api.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
  • https://download.microsoft.com
  • https://onegetcdn.azureedge.net
  • https://go.microsoft.com
  • https://appsapi.cloudmersive.com
  • https://mcr.microsoft.com
  • https://eastus.data.mcr.microsoft.com
  • https://prod-us-east-1-starport-layer-bucket.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com

In addition, navigate to the server in Cloudmersive Management Center under Private Cloud, click on Configure Node, and check "Enable Proxy Server for Outbound Installation Traffic", provide the proxy server (e.g. https://myproxy.mydomain.com:8080) and click on Save Changes.


After Installation

If you are installing Cloudmersive Private Cloud in high availability mode, you will want to configure an Elastic Load Balancer to balance traffic across the nodes. Provision a hardware or software load balancer and set the endpoints to the HTTP 80 (or HTTPS 443 if you configured it) port on each of the nodes that you installed. Use the public endpoint of the load balancer as the BasePath for all of the API clients.

You can test your APIs and installation using Postman, by following these steps.