Manual:CHR AWS installation

Tools required

To get CHR RouterOS running on Amazon AWS cloud at this moment, there are certain steps that you have to do to get this working from scratch.

• Virtual management software that works with ISOLINUX booter/installer on CHR image (KVM, VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation, VMWare Fusion, Hyper-V these tools are interchangeable);
• Tool to resize the image file prior the installation as default image is 64MB of size and in some cases, more storage is required (qemu-img, VMWare built-in tool, VirtualBox external tool);
• AWS API tools installed and configured (ec2-*).

Installation steps (short version)

• On your AWS EC2 switch over to Ireland cluster and look up AMI ID eu-west1 ami-7d77c10e (on us-east1 ami-07ddf26d)
• Copy it over to a cluster of your choice
• Launch instances

This instance will have AMI as described in the long version

Installation steps (long version)

• Resize the image before installing the RouterOS. Amazon AWS minimal image size is 1GB. After RouterOS is installed it will be much harder to change the available size, the following command will increase the image size by 940MB

qemu-img resize chr-6.34rc21.img +940M

• Start the guest with new and resized image and wait until it installs RouterOS and goes to reboot. At that time you have to stop the guest manually.

kvm chr-6.34rc21.img

• Import the image as a volume on your AWS. As a return you will get the volume ID

ec2-import-volume chr-6.34rc21.img -f raw -s 1 -b <bucket> -o <AKIAEXAMPLELALALA> -w <SECRETACCESSKEY > -z eu-west-1a

The import may take a while, it is possible to follow the progress:

ec2-describe-conversion-task <task id>

• Create a snapshot. Correct volume ID will be availabe when the previous command ends or from your AWS account

ec2-create-snapshot vol-e3c74810

• Register AWS image as an AMI

ec2-register -n CHR -s snap-a664a48e -d "6.34rc21" -a x86_64 --virtualization-type hvm

• Now you can launch instance from your AMI.