In this tutorial I am going to show you how easy it is to install CactiEZ appliance and run this as a virtual guest appliance in VMWare Workstation. After the installation the virtual guest is portable and can be moved to a VMWare Server installation. Note from http://cactiusers.org what CactiEZ appliance is. If you never heard or used this open source monitoring tool than now it is the time to get this thing up and running.

CactiEZ is the fastest possible way to get up and running with Cacti. CactiEZ is an auto-installing CD based on CentOS 4.3∞. The disk is a completely remastered CD (from the 4 CD version, not the Server CD) and stripped down to the bare essentials (no GUI). The CD weighs in at roughly 355 Megs, and installed is roughly 855 Megs. At only 305 packages, it still includes a preconfigured firewall (only allowing http, https, ssh, netflow, webmin, and remote Syslog).

Go to http://cactiusers.org/downloads/ and download the latest CactiEZ 0.3 stable appliance.

Current size of the zipped file is 292MB. Save it and extract the files with your favorite tool. I use WinRAR, but the 7z will also do the job .

Create new virtual machine based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and use all defaults; for the virtual disk I assigned 64GB.

Open the properties of the cd-rom drive and locate the CactiEZ iso file.

Start the virtual guest machine. Press enter and watch the show. My installation took me 3 minutes.

Login and use the root/CactiEZ to login. Change the password with passwd command! Rule of thumb is to always change the default passwords.

netstat -an | grep “LIST” will show all listining ports on the appliance.

22 (SSH), 80 (HTTP), 443 (HTTPS) and 10000 (webadmin) are important tcp (L4) ports. Go to http://ipaddress and login with admin/admin. Change the password.

Cacti is ready for use.

Check the CentOS and VMWare tools post how to install them from SSH shell.