How to install Junos Space and Security Director

In this post we will install Junos Space Network Management Platform virtual appliance for VMware ESX and Security Director. As you might know Space platform is the ground application holding other applications such as Security Director which manages SRX firewalls. Hence it is necessary to install Space platform first and Security Director on top of it. Make sure you have 8GB RAM available in your ESX server. Let’s start the installation:

1) Download the ova image here We are downloading the latest release space-14.1R2.9 at the time of this post.

2) Download the security director here
Latest one available is 14.1R2.6 release which is compatible with the platform release we have downloaded.

3) Then deploy the Space Platform OVA file as usual like any other VM to your ESX platform.

After deployment, you will see that 8GB RAM is assigned to the VM.

4) Now power on the VM and get into the console. You will be asked to enter user and password which are admin and abc123 respectively.

Once you entered these, you will be asked to change the password. Choose your new password according to the instructions. Otherwise you may fail to set a proper password.

Then accept the default installation type Space Platform by enter.

5) Now it is time to configure network settings. eth0 is the first interface that you see in VM properties of ESX and this IP I am using will be set to eth0 interface in the linux platform and it provides management access.

Space pings the default gateway, DNS and NTP server you enter. They don’t have to be pingable but make sure you assign your eth0 interface on ESX properties to the correct VLAN and IP can be reached.

6) Now set the GUI IP address and NTP server. It is better you set the NTP here. GUI address is the one you type in your browser to access the management platform.

Then you type the display name. This is used as the fabric node name.

7) Set maintenance password which is used for some upgrade and other maintenance operations. It is different than admin password. It must be minimum 8 characters and apply the settings as shown.

Once you apply the changes, deamons will be restarted and it will take some time for you to see the following screen. By choosing option 7 and providing admin password you set at the beginning, you will drop to the Linux shell.

Now I can connect to the box via SSH at its ip 100.100.100.117

[root@space-000c29cb6706 ~]# ip -4 addr
1: lo:  mtu 16436 qdisc noqueue 
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
2: eth0:  mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000
    inet 100.100.100.117/24 brd 100.100.100.255 scope global eth0             <---Primary IP
    inet 100.100.100.118/24 brd 100.100.100.255 scope global secondary eth0:0 <---Secondary GUI IP Address

Now it is time to login to the web UI. Web admin user is different than admin and maintenance. Web user is super and initial default password is juniper123 After login, you should change this one.

Below is a screenshot after the first login to space platform.

Now we are very close to finish this post as we will just deploy the security director.

Go to Adminitration->Applications->Add Application

Then select "Upload via HTTP" and upload the security director image you downloaded.

A job will be created and application name (Security Director) will appear in the list after a while. Once it appears, click install

It will take a while for the application to be installed. To see the job status, you can click the upper right corner CHECK icon.

Once it finishes, you will see 3 new applications.

From the left drop down list, by selecting Security Director you can switch to SD's screen.

and here we are! we have installed both space platform and security director. Last but not least I need to recap usernames we have configured so far to avoid any confusion.

1) admin user: We set this for the Linux shell and default password during the installation is abc123
2) maintenance user: we also set password for this but it is used for special operations. No default password for this. It must be set.
3) super user: this user is used for WEB UI and initial default password is juniper123

I think I have completed this long post now. If you see any mistake, please do let me know.