Deployment and Management Guide for Cisco IoT FND on OVA with Postgres and InfluxDB, Release 5.x.x and Later

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Install OVA using VMware ESXi server

Updated: February 4, 2026

Overview

Use this procedure to install an OVA file on a VMware ESXi server. This task guides you through preparing your environment, deploying the OVA, and performing the initial configuration to set up Cisco IoT FND on your virtualized platform

Before you begin

This procedure focuses on installing the OVA using VMware ESXi server. You can use any virtualization software of your choice.

  • Log in to the IP address of a VMware ESXi server running 6.5 and above via a web browser with your user credentials.

  • Ensure that you meet the following VMware server machine (VM CPU and memory) requirements:

    • 24 GB memory

    • 4 vCPUs

    • Hard disk: 540 GB

  • Use the following credentials for SSH access after installing OVA

    • Username: fnduser

    • Password: C!sco123

Procedure

1.

Use the steps provided in Broadcom's documentation to Deploy a Virtual Machine From an OVF or OVA File in the VMware Host Client .

Note

  • After choosing the data store, choose the provisioning type and enable the Power on automatically option. This ensures to power on the virtual machine once the deployment process is complete. Click Next .

  • Thick Provisioning — Absolute reservation on the disk space. For the Cisco IoT FND OVA deployment, the disk space required is 600 GB on the ESXi server.

  • Thin Provisioning — The disk space grows on demand. For the Cisco IoT FND OVA deployment, the disk space is approximately 50 GB initially and the disk space occupied by VM will grow as per the scale of deployment.

  • If the selected storage location doesn't have sufficient storage for the largest file installation option, a message displays noting insufficient storage. If the warning message appears, select another storage resource with greater capacity and click Next .

2.

The deployed VM gets listed in the left pane. Choose the IoT FND machine name.
3.

Click Console and login with root/cisco123 once the OS is up.

4.

Once you enter the default password, you are prompted to reset your password.

  • The default root user password is C!sco123.

  • The following conditions are applicable to reset the default password:

    • The password must be at least 8 characters in length

    • The password must have at least 1 uppercase character

    • The password must have at least 1 lowercase character

    • The password must have at least 1 special character

    • The password must have at least 1 digit

    • The password cannot be the same as any of the previous 5 passwords used

After you complete the password reset, Cisco IoT FND is fully deployed.
5.

Assign a static IP address and a DNS server on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system for managing and configuring the Cisco IoT FND.

Note

Follow the same steps for TPS OVA installation as well. In order to upgrade the TPS OVA, delete the existing TPS and reinstall the TPS OVA iot-tps-version_number.ova with the updated version number.

6.

Open a terminal window, and set up Health Monitoring for the Fog Director Container from FND.

Example:

[root@iot-fnd ~]# cd /opt/monitor/
            [root@iot-fnd monitor]# .setup.sh
Starting setup...
            Configuring environment...
            Setup completed successfully.

Cisco IoT FND starts monitoring the Fog Director container on the ADMIN > SERVERS page.

What to do next

Configure hostnames in Cisco IoT FND and TPS servers.