First Steps

The first steps guide provides suggestions for your initial post installation orcharhino configuration.

  • In the user menu, you can configure your account settings and log out.

  • In the monitor menu, you can to view and create reports of managed hosts.

  • In the content menu, you can manage content.

  • In the hosts menu, you can deploy and manage hosts.

  • In the applications menu, you can configure the application centric deployment (ACD) plugin.

  • In the configure menu, you can configure your configuration management tools.

  • In the infrastructure menu, you can configure the infrastructure of orcharhino and its managed hosts.

  • In the administer menu, you can administer your orcharhino.

Initial Configuration Workflow

The orcharhino mind map provided in this section illustrates a possible workflow to get you from a plain orcharhino installation to your first fully entitled host deployment.

In practice, the order of the steps below is flexible. Depending on the expected outcome and the level of configuration already provided by the orcharhino installation, some may be omitted entirely. They are nevertheless presented in their entirety as a reference and mental model:

Start with infrastructure

This part of the graphic illustrates which orcharhino management UI menus you will be using in order. They are the infrastructure menu, the content menu, the hosts menu, the configure menu, and finally the hosts menu again.

If you are to deploy hosts, you will first need to tell orcharhino about your infrastructure:

The infrastructure menu includes compute resources and subnets

Unless you are planning to use orcharhino exclusively for bare metal installations, you will also have to configure your compute resource providers. You will also need to configure any subnets (networks) that you want to deploy hosts to.

Next, prepare the content for the hosts that are to be deployed:

The content menu includes lifecycle environments

Finally, configure the host deployment itself:

The hosts menu allows us to configure installation media

Your hosts require appropriate installation media. You also need to tell orcharhino about any operating systems you want to deploy. Finally, you need to associate the orcharhino operating systems with appropriate templates. These steps will have been performed automatically for any operating systems you selected during step four of the main orcharhino installation steps.

The hosts menu allows us to configure installation media

Though not strictly necessary, it is highly recommended to collect all of this configuration within a single host group (for each type of host you want to deploy). This way you can deploy hosts by selecting the appropriate host group and making adjustments, rather than performing the tedious task of manually selecting every option every time you want to deploy a host.

Putting everything we have done together, we are now ready to deploy a host:

You can now choose create hosts from the hosts menu