How to Manually Install Jetpack

  • Article

Jetpack is typically downloaded and installed onto CycleCloud-managed VMs automatically when they start up without any user interaction. This is the preferred method for getting Jetpack on a CycleCloud-managed VM. However, in some cases one may want to manually install Jetpack onto a VM.

Warning

Installing Jetpack directly onto a custom image is no longer recommended in CycleCloud 8. The Jetpack installation process in CycleCloud 8 takes only a few seconds on average and requires only network access to your storage account so there is typically no reason to pre-install Jetpack on custom images.

Why Install Jetpack

Custom images allow you to have full control over which version of software is installed on your OS. If you have requirements that are met only with a specific version of Jetpack and that Jetpack version isn't installed by default, you will want to manually install that Jetpack version onto a VM and create a custom image.

Creating a custom image with a pre-installed version of Jetpack will also provide a small performance improvement when starting VMs since Jetpack will no longer need to be downloaded and installed every time a VM boots. This performance improvement is negligible (a few seconds) and should not be the primary reason one creates the custom image.

Note

At certain phases of installation and configuration management, Jetpack can consume 500MB of memory. Consider this when choosing a VM size. Burstable Standard_B1ls can be unstable.

Install via YUM or APT

The easiest way to install Jetpack is via the apt/yum repository. First add the repository to your VM and then install Jetpack:

via YUM:

sudo cat > /etc/yum.repos.d/cyclecloud.repo <<EOF
[cyclecloud]
name=cyclecloud
baseurl=https://packages.microsoft.com/yumrepos/cyclecloud
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc
EOF
sudo yum install -y jetpack8

via APT:

sudo wget -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/microsoft.asc https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc
sudo echo 'deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/microsoft.asc] https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/cyclecloud bionic main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/cyclecloud.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt-get install -y jetpack8

Alternatively, a manual installation using the Jetpack archive CycleCloud bundles is still available as follows for cases where APT/YUM are not a good solution.

Install Jetpack Manually

Locate the Jetpack Installer for Manual Installation

The Jetpack installer can be found within your CycleCloud installation at /opt/cycle_server/work/staging/jetpack. This directory will contain all the versions available to your installation for both Linux and Windows VMs.

/opt/cycle_server/work/staging/jetpack/
├── 7.9.0
│   ├── jetpack-7.9.0-linux.tar.gz
│   └── jetpack-7.9.0-windows.zip
├── 7.9.1
│   ├── jetpack-7.9.1-linux.tar.gz
│   └── jetpack-7.9.1-windows.zip

Note

The version numbers you see may differ from the ones listed here based on the version of CycleCloud you are currently using.

Upload Jetpack Archive to a VM

Once you have located the Jetpack installer you want to install, you will need to upload it to your VM. For this example we will move the file to Linux using SCP into the azureuser's home directory:

scp /opt/cycle/jetpack/work/staging/jetpack/7.9.0/jetpack-7.9.0-linux.tar.gz azureuser@myserver.eastus.cloudapp.com:/home/azureuser

Note

Do not use a VM from a VMSS for installing Jetpack and customizing an image. It is not possible to capture a VM image from VMSS.

Install Jetpack

Log into the VM where you uploaded the Jetpack installer, decompress and run the install command. Installation instructions are provided for both Linux and Windows.

Linux

You will need to be logged in as azureuser.

tar -xf jetpack-7.9.0-linux.tar.gz
cd jetpack
./install.sh

mkdir -p /opt/cycle
tar -xf jetpack-8.0.0-linux.tar.gz -C /opt/cycle
./opt/cycle/jetpack/system/install/install.sh

Windows

unzip jetpack-7.9.0-windows.zip
cd jetpack
install.cmd

New-Item -Force -ItemType 'directory' -Path 'C:\cycle'
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName('System.IO.Compression.FileSystem')
[System.IO.Compression.ZipFile]::ExtractToDirectory((Get-Item 'jetpack-8.0.0-windows.zip'), (Get-Item 'C:\cycle'))
C:\cycle\jetpack\system\install\install.cmd

These commands will install jetpack to /opt/cycle/jetpack on Linux or C:\cycle\jetpack on Windows ($JETPACK_HOME). An installation log is available at $JETPACK_HOME/logs/installation.log

Capturing the Custom Image

After installing Jetpack and performing any other custom image configurations the VM is ready for image capture. Note the instructions differ between Windows and Linux VMs.

Using the Custom Image with CycleCloud

To use the image with a CycleCloud cluster you can specify the ImageName in your cluster template or by specifying it using the custom image option in the UI. If we had named our custom image MyCustomImage we would use it as follows in a cluster template:

[[node custom]]
  ImageName = /subscriptions/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx/resourceGroups/MyResourceGroup/providers/Microsoft.Compute/images/MyCustomImage
  DownloadJetpack = false

Note

Specifying DownloadJetpack=false is not needed, but can save a small amount of time by not downloading Jetpack on boot. If DownloadJetpack is not specified, CycleCloud will attempt to download and install Jetpack at runtime and see that Jetpack has already been installed on your image.

Further Reading