Last time i spoke about Opengear Operation Manager, an excellent and intuitive way to manage your oobm network and safely access your devices during a network issue. Operation Manager is a standalone device and you would probably install them in every critical sites of your company, doing so become hard and time-expensive to manage all OM at the same time, Lighthouse orchestrator helps us to group together all the remote OM and manage them in a single way.
You can deploy Lighthouse in several ways, on-prem or in a public cloud environment. From the Opengear repository you can download the vm image or scripts you need to activate it and all the documentation needed:
After you activate the orchestrator and access it, you are prompted to the main dashboard where you can find the current OM joined the Lighthouse and its status:
The first thing you may want to do is to enroll a new OM into Lighthouse. This is a double-sided configuration, one part is done on OM and one part on Lighthouse.
On the OM side you simply need to configure the Lighthouse IP address, an application port if different from 443 (the communication between OM and LH is based on SSL VPN) and an “Enrollment Token” for fast enrollment or “Enrollment Bundle” if you want to apply some policy during the enrollment:
On the LH side you firstly need to define the “External Network Address”, the LH address reachable by the remote OMs, and then the “Enrollment Token” or “Enrollment Bundle”:
LH external ip address
Enrollment token
Enrollment bundle
If you are using the enrollment bundle you can auto-approve the OM that request to join the LH, otherwise you need to manually approve them via the “Pending Nodes” menù:
When you properly add your OM to LH, you can connect to the OM via the “desktop” icon on the main dashboard or you can directly view the OM ports and connect to them inside the LH GUI. If you have a lot of OM you can filter them by a variety of attributes or tags/groups:
Nodes
Node ports
With LH you can also take advantage of 2 important maintenance tasks: OM software upgrade and OM configuration backup.
Node firmware upgrade is very straightforward, when you create a new software upgrade job you will give a job name, select the firmware and the nodes to be upgraded. After that you will schedule the job and that’s it!
Node firmware upgrade
Job configuration
Job schedule
Job review and confirmation
Job in progress
The node backup menù allow you to set all the proper configuration to schedule the OM configuration backup and save them into a global repository. In the node backup menù yo ucan configure various attributes like:
- number of stored backups
- backup retention
- backup location
- backup scheduling
Node backup
