Installing Cisco ACS on VMware workstation

Installing Cisco ACS on VMware workstation

Hello,

VMware workstation is one of the powerful tools that students and network engineers can use to create test labs for their study or work. In this post I’ll show you how to install Cisco ACS on VMware Workstation. So let’s begin.

First you need to know the minimum requirements for installing Cisco ACS.

The minimum requirement  are as shown below 

Requirement Type	Minimum Requirements
CPU	2 CPUs (dual CPU, Xeon, Core2 Duo or 2 single CPUs)
Memory	4 GB RAM
Hard Disk	A minimum of 60 GB is required. Maximum storage is up to 750 GB. Note ACS partitions the available disk space automatically during the installation process. Note It is recommended that you allocate the hard disk size to be greater than 500 GB for the secondary instance, which acts as a log collector.
NIC (Network Interface Card)	1 Gb dedicated NIC interface
Hypervisor	VMware ESXi 5.0 VMware ESXi 5.1 is supported after ACS 5.4 patch 3

Let's begin 

Now, let go to the VMware Workstation and configure the VM to be able to host the ACS.

• -          Go to VMware and create a new virtual machine and leave it on the typical configurations as shown below and click next
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• -          In the next screen select the option I will Install the operating system later (This is very important) and click next
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•      Now from operating system choose Linux and CentOS 64 as shown below 

• In the next screen choose the name of the virtual machine (Cisco-Acs) notice that you can change this name later. Click next 

• In the next screen you will need to choose the virtual hard disk size. Choose 200 GB and the configurations as below and click next.

• In the next screen click on customize hardware to configure the system requirements. Allow for 2 GB for RAM and make the network adaptor to point to the VMnet 1 or any other network adaptor. The most important thing is that the selected network adaptor has to be in the same subnet as the associate network drive in the host machine. In my case my VMnet 1 is 192.168.211.0/24. The final configurations should look like the screenshot below click close

                                   

• The following screenshot is the selected vmnet in the host machine

• Now go to the virtual machine that you have just created and click edit virtual machine to choose the image of the ACS. Go to the CD/DVD and change the selected option into (use ios). Then navigate to the ios and click ok. The options should look like the screenshot below click ok and then click on power on this virtual machine.

•        Wait for seconds until the options of installing the ACS appears. Choose the option 1 and click enter

•  The next screens then will appear

• In the next screen type setup and hit enter. 

• After finishing the configurations, make sure that you can ping the ACS ip address from your host PC. I use the 192.168.211.20 for the my ACS machine.

• Ok. that all for this lab. In the next lab, we'll learn how to configure AAA on ACS.

Thanks .......