Installing Morpheus on your Laptop or PC

In this blog, we walk through the steps to install your own personal Morpheus instance on your laptop or PC using Oracle VirtualBox, CentOS 8 and the Community Edition of Morpheus. Morpheus Community Edition provides full functionality and support for up to 25 instances. This is a great way to get hands-on experience with Morpheus and start to learn about its capabilities.

Step 1 ‘ Download and install Oracle VirtualBox

In this step we install VirtualBox on MacOS. For installation on other operating systems refer to the installation instructions which can be found in the VirtualBox user manual here.

Download Oracle Virtual Box for your host from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

At the time of writing the latest version was 6.1.10. For MacOS the VirtualBox software ships in a dmg (disk image) file. To install VirtualBox on MacOS perform the following steps:

1. Double click on the dmg file to mount the contents. A window opens which provides instructions to install the software.
2. Double click the VirtualBox.pkg installer file displayed in the window to start the installer. The installation is straight forward and you can accept all default settings.
3. On completion of the install, a VirtualBox icon is added to the Applications folder in Finder.

Step 2 ‘ Create a CentOS virtual machine in VirtualBox

In this step we create our first virtual machine in VirtualBox which we will then use to install Morpheus on.

1. Double click on the VirtualBox application to start it. Click New.
2. Enter a name for the VM, set type to Linux and version to Red Hat (64 bit). Click Continue.
3. Set the memory size of the VM to 8192MB. This is the minimum amount of memory for a Morpheus install but will be sufficient for a laptop lab environment. Click Continue.
4. Select Create a virtual hard disk now. Click Create.
5. Select VDI. Click Continue.
6. Select Dynamically allocated. Click Continue.
7. Set file size to 100GB. Check that the file location is set to somewhere suitable. Click Create.
8. The VM will be created and you will be presented with a summary screen.

Step 3 ‘ Install CentOS

Morpheus supports a number of different operating systems ‘ see the latest documentation for details here. In this example, we will use CentOS 8 which can be downloaded from here. The file downloaded was called CentoOS-8.2.2004-x86_64-dvd1.iso

1. Download the CentOS iso to your laptop or PC. Once downloaded, go to VirtualBox, select the VM and click on Settings. Go to the Storage tab. Under Controller:IDE click on Empty. On the right of the screen, under Attributes, click on the CD and from the menu that appears select Choose a disk file. Select the CentOS ISO downloaded previously.

You will now see the CentOS ISO loaded. Click OK

Click Start to power on the VM.

2. Once the VM powers on, a terminal window will appear and you will see the GRUB boot menu. Select Install CentOS Linux 8 and hit enter
3. Set the Language and click Continue.
4. The Installation Summary screen will be displayed.

Click Installation Destination. Ensure that the disk is selected and storage configuration is set to Automatic. Click Done.

Click Time & Date to set the Timezone. Click Done.

Click Network and Host  Name to set the hostname. Enter the host name in the box and click apply to set the hostname. Click Done.

Once all changes have been made, from the Installation Summary screen, click Begin Installation. The installation will start.

5. It is a good idea at this point to set the root password and create a user.  Update the User Settings

Click Root Password and enter a root password. Click Done.

Click User Creation and create an initial user. Click Done.

Once the installation has completed click Finish Configuration and then Reboot.

The VM will now reboot. VirtualBox will boot the VM using the installation media again as this is still mounted in the optical drive. Once the VM has rebooted go to Devices -> Optical Drives -> Remove disk from virtual drive. Select Force Unmount. Now click on Machine -> Reset to reset the VM. The VM will now boot from the virtual hard drive.

Once the VM has been rebooted you will need to accept the license. Click License Information

Check the box to accept the licence agreement and click Done.

Click Finish Configuration. You will then be able to log in to the VM. Login as the user created during installation. You may be presented with some additional set up questions for gnome such as language, keyboard layout, location services, etc. Once you have answered these you will be logged in and able to use CentOS.

6. Before we can use the VM, we need to do a bit of extra configuration to get the network set up. Open up a CentOS terminal by going to Activities ‘> Terminal.

The network interface enp0s3 will not have an inet entry, which means it hasn’t started the interface on boot. You can check this by running the command ip addr and looking at the entry for enp0s3.

To configure the enp0s3 to be activated at boot time, edit the ifcfg-enp0s3 cfg file:

sudo vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-enp0s3

Change ONBOOT=no to ONBOOT=yes

We also need to change the Network type in VirtualBox to Bridged Adapter so we can SSH into the VM. Select the VM in VirtualBox and click on Settings. Go to Network and change it from NAT to Bridged Adapter. Click OK and then reboot the VM.

7. Once the VM has rebooted, log back in and open up a terminal window. Run the command ip addr to list the network interfaces. You will see that interface enp0s3 is up and now has an IP address. Make a note of the IP address and then use it to SSH directly from your laptop using the MacOS bash or zsh terminal window. From this point on we will use the MacOS zsh terminal.

Step 4 ‘ Install Morpheus

We are now ready to install Morpheus. The installation is very straight forward but before we begin there are a few prerequisite tasks that we need to perform to ensure the installation is successful.

1. Currently our CentOS VM /etc/hosts files only has entries for localhost. We need to edit this and add in the IP address and hostname of the appliance.

Now is also a good time to add the IP address and hostname of the Morpheus appliance to the hosts file on your laptop or PC.

2. SELinux is set to enforcing by default. It is recommended to set this to permissive for the Morpheus appliance. To avoid a reboot, you can change SELinux from enforcing to permissive by running the following command sudo setenforce 0. However, once the system is rebooted it will revert back to enforcing again. To permanently set SELinux to permissive, edit /etc/selinux/config and set the SELINUX line to permissive, then reboot the system.
3. Update the OS by running the command sudo yum update -y
4. We are now ready to download the Morpheus software. To access the software, you need to register and log in to the Morpheus Hub https://morpheushub.com

Once you are logged in, go to the Downloads link and find the release package for the OS (at the time of this blog’s release the Morpheus version was 4.2.2). Make a note of the download URL and MD5 checksum.

Download the software directly to the Morpheus VM with the command:

wget https://<download_location_fromMorpheusHub>/files/morpheus-appliance-4.2.2-2.el8.x86_64.rpm

Once the download has completed, check file integrity with the md5sum command:

5. The next step is to install the Morpheus package we have just downloaded with the rpm command:

sudo rpm -i morpheus-appliance-4.2.2-2.el8.x86_64.rpm

Once the RPM package is installed, configure and start the Morpheus admin UI by running the command:

sudo morpheus-ctl reconfigure

NOTE: This step can take some time.

Once the reconfigure command has completed, check that all services are running with the command:

sudo morpheus-ctl status

You should see 7 running services:

6. Now log in as root on the CentOS VM and edit the /etc/morpheus/morpheus.rb file. Locate the appliance_url line at the end of the file. You will see that the url points to the hostname of the VM. This was created during the reconfigure command we ran earlier. Replace the hostname with the IP address of the VM, e.g:

We’ll cover the reasons for doing this in a later blog.

As we have changed the morpheus.rb file, we now need to run the reconfigure command once more:

sudo morpheus-ctl reconfigure

7. We are now ready to log in to the Morpheus UI. Open up a browser and go to the url you updated in the morpheus.rb file.  In my case https://192.168.0.38

On the first screen you will need to Login or Register with the Morpheus Hub.

As we have already registered with Morpheus Hub to download the software, we can log in using the same email address and password

Once logged in you will be taken through the first time setup wizard. Provide a Name for the Master Tenant. This is usually your company name.

Provide the details for the Morpheus Master User.  (This will be an administrator user).

Enter the Appliance Name and url. Click Complete Setup.

Congratulations! You are now logged into your very own Morpheus Appliance.

Next Steps

From here you’ll want to connect to a cloud or two.  Let me point you to the guides on how to connect to your on premises VMware vSphere environment, and to your public cloud AWS account.

1. Guide to connect to VMware vSphere
2. Guide to connect to Amazon AWS
3. Guide to connect to Azure Cloud
4. Guide to connect to Google GCP
5. Check out the many native Morpheus integrations

Would you like a live demo of Morpheus?  Go ahead and request one here.

Wanna try the Morpheus Community Edition?

Download the Community Edition of the Morpheus platform.  The Community Edition includes the full Morpheus platform framework including all features and capabilities with some caveats.    Visit the Morpheus Hub site to register and request the community edition.

Stay safe, stay healthy!