NEMS Linux Virtual Appliance

The NEMS Linux Virtual Appliance is only available to Patrons.

The NEMS Linux virtual appliance has 3 available releases:

  • NEMS OVA (Open Virtual Appliance) can be easily deployed on virtualization hypervisors such as VMware ESXi, vSphere, Player or Workstation or Oracle VirtualBox. The OVA package contains the entire virtual appliance and is ready to import and boot.

  • NEMS VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) can be used to deploy NEMS Linux on Microsoft Hyper-V.

  • NEMS QCOW2 (QEMU Copy-On-Write) can be used to deploy NEMS Linux on QEMU, KVM, Proxmox VE, and other hypervisors that support the QCOW2 format.

The underlying software in each release is identical. The individual releases are created in order to ease deployment across a variety of the most popular virtualization hypervisors.

Host Requirements

All Hypervisors

  • VT-x/AMD-V capable CPU with feature enabled in BIOS/UEFI

  • Minimum 6 GB free RAM

  • 100 GB hard disk space

VMware ESXi

  • Version 7.0 or higher. NEMS Linux uses Virtual Hardware Version 14.

To run NEMS Linux on a legacy version of ESXi, such as ESXi 6.7, you will need to extract the VMDK from the OVA file (rename the file .tar and open it with a tool such as tar or 7-zip) and use vmkfstools to expand the disk to thick provisioned. Please consider upgrading your hypervisor for official support. See: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1028943

Guest Specifications

  • 64-Bit

  • 80 GB Virtual Hard Disk (Dynamic / Thin Provisioning where supported)

  • 4 GB RAM

Global Deployment Notes

  • Network Bridge - Before booting, you must configure your virtual Network Interface to use your actual LAN in Bridged mode.

  • Unique MAC Address - While configuring your virtual Network Interface, you must generate a new MAC address for the virtual NIC. If your hypervisor does not offer a feature to automatically generate a MAC address you can visit nemslinux.com/api/mac to generate one. Do not simply enter random numbers. Record your virtual MAC address somewhere safe. Do not change your MAC address after initializing NEMS. Doing so would result in your HWID changing, which will disassociate your Virtual Appliance with NEMS Cloud Services.

  • CPU Virtualization Features - x86 Virtualization must be available and enabled on your physical CPU in order to boot the Virtual Appliance. This is found in your host machine’s BIOS/UEFI settings and will be called VT-x (Intel) or AMD-V (AMD), or something similar such as “Virtualization Extensions”.

  • Static RAM Mode - Ensure RAM is not assigned as “dynamic” RAM. ESXi, for example, may remove all RAM from the appliance if set to dynamic, which will result in NEMS Linux not functioning correctly. RAM should be static.

  • Hyper-V - Choose Generation 1 under Specify Generation when creating VM.

  • Following initialization, you’ll see a CPU Temperature check that reports an unknown state since your hypervisor doesn’t report CPU Temperature data for virtual machines. You can remove this check in NEMS Configurator by going to Advanced Services [Show], Edit CPU Temperature, and remove NEMS from your assigned hosts. Save the change and generate your config.

Installation Procedures

VirtualBox

Minimum VirtualBox Version: 7.0

When importing the NEMS Linux OVA, you must set the MAC Address Policy to “Generate new MAC address for all network adapters”.

NEMS Linux OVA installation on VirtualBox