We just put out a short video of Cambium cnMaestro On-Premises running as a VM on an rXg. If you have Cambium APs at a site and there is already an rXg there, you do not need another box and you do not need a cnMaestro cloud subscription to manage them. The rXg has a built-in bhyve hypervisor, Cambium ships cnMaestro On-Premises as an OVA, and the two fit together with no glue.
The whole procedure is done from the admin console and it goes like this.
Services, then Virtualization. On the Virtualization Host, open Disk Images, Create New, and upload the cnMaestro On-Premises OVA. The OVA is about 3 GB, so the upload takes a few minutes and the video is sped up through that part.
Then Virtual Machines, Create New. Name it, set the bootloader to UEFI-CSM, and size it. We used 10 GB of memory and four cores. Put the virtual interface on the virtual switch for whatever network you want cnMaestro to sit on, and under Virtual Disks pick the cnMaestro image you just uploaded. Cloud-init stays empty [ the OVA is a self contained appliance ]. Click Create.
The VM shows up in the list. Open Commands and Start it. First boot takes a few minutes. To find where it landed, go to Instruments, MAC, DHCP, DNS, and match a DHCP lease to the VM's MAC address. VM MACs on the rXg come out of the 58:9c:fc block, so the lease whose vendor column says FreeBSD Foundation is the one you want.
Browse to that address and you get the cnMaestro On-Premises sign in page, served by a VM on the same hardware that is doing your gateway work. Sign in and onboard the Cambium devices exactly as you would in the cloud. The rXg side of the integration has not changed, you add cnMaestro as a WLAN Controller under Network, Wireless, and the WLANs, profiles, AP zones and APs get imported. That part is in the manual.
The way I see it, a controller is just software, and software that needs four cores and 10 GB of RAM belongs on the box that is already at the site. The management plane ends up on the same hardware as the gateway, on your network, under your control, and the VM's backups, snapshots and interfaces are handled from the rXg admin console alongside everything else [ it is bhyve on FreeBSD with ZFS underneath, so a snapshot before a cnMaestro upgrade is cheap ]. That is one less box to buy, rack, patch and back up, and one less subscription.
One more thing. We are working on something for Cambium APs that will not need the cnMaestro controller at all. More on that when it is ready.
Video: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7508527793672986625/
Hypervisor manual: https://www.rgnets.com/manual/services/virtualization
Cambium integration manual: https://www.rgnets.com/manual/network/wireless/cambium
Source: r/RGNets · by /u/simonlok