Tulip On-Premise Virtual Machine Details

Tulip On-Premise Virtual Machine Details

Here's what you will need to know before configuring an on-premises virtual machine with Tulip.

Notice: Tulip has announced End of Life for traditional On-Premise deployments.

If you are unable to run Tulip as a managed service, please contact your Tulip representative to discuss hosting a Tulip instance within your private AWS or Azure account

If you are currently an On-Premise customer, LTS 5 is the last version supported. Support for LTS 5 ends in April 2022.

Considerations:

Tulip’s customers include Fortune 100 as well as small, family owned businesses. Therefore, each project must be contracted individually due to unique IT environments & constraints. For our customers that have internal cloud resources available (perhaps vSphere), we recommend installing Tulip in a virtual machine environment.

Key Questions & Information for your IT Group:

Network Configuration

1. Do you have static IP on the VM? This is a requirement for Tulip.
2. Do you have an internal certificate authority in the network issuing SSL certs?
3. If so, this is the process: We will give your IT staff a CSR (certificate signing request). They will take it, sign it and give us a certificate (x509, PEM) for the Tulip Platform.
4. All Edge Devices, Connectors Host will need trust the Root-CA from the company.
5. If using the default setup with LetsEncrypt, the certificates will need to be updated every 3 months.
6. Will this VM be accessible on the internal network from all Tulip components?
7. Who is responsible for network configuration at your company? If this is someone other than your IT administrator, we should introduce them to the Tulip platform to begin network configuration discussions.
8. Is your IT administrator willing to open port 3465 outbound so Tulip can provide remote support?

Installation of Tulip Platform

1. Do you, or your IT administrator, have sudo (system administrator) access to the VM environment? This is necessary for installation.
2. Tulip does not need any separate databases to be installed, these will be managed as part of the Tulip Platform.
3. A screenshare (ex: TeamViewer) is necessary so we can guide your IT administrator through the installation process. Sudo access is required.
4. Often times there are different storage options available for the VM. We recommend understanding the Storage Area Network solution in place at your company and having the appropriate EFS/iSCSI/block store available. This way the data storage is defined, ideally with redundant storage included.
5. Once all of this has been defined, Tulip will provide a script that requires sudo access in order to enable modules within the kernel. Other programs such as firewalld, iptables, dnsmasq e.g. may need to be modified, or disabled.

Key Steps of Tulip On-Premise Virtual Machine Install

1. Confirm who your IT & network administrators will be to assist with installation of Tulip Platform.
2. Assuming a contract has been signed, Tulip will create a shared project plan with you to establish key milestones for deployment of Tulip.
3. The virtual machine environment will be prepared by your IT group.
4. A screenshare will be initiated between you and Tulip. At this point the Tulip Platform installation files will be transferred, installed, and necessary scripts run.
5. After installation, Tulip will guide you through setup of Tulip components including Edge Devices, Connector Hosts and Tulip players.