Deployment

In this activity you will:

• Define the Terraform plan variables
• Initialize the Terraform providers
• Deploy the VM-Series firewall
• Update the SSH configs
• Set the firewall administrative password

Define the Terraform plan variables

Change into the deployment directory.

$ cd deployment

Edit the file gcp_variables.tf. This file contains Terraform variables that will be referenced in other Terraform plan files.

Replace the default value for the variable gcp_project_id with the GCP project you created previously. Fill in the gcp_region variable's description and default values with your region of choice. The current list of available GCP regions may be found at https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/.

The gcp_credentials_file, and gcp_ssh_key variables have been pre-populated for you.

variable "gcp_project_id" {
  description = "GCP Project ID"
  type = "string"
  default = ""
}

variable "gcp_region" {
  description = ""
  type = "string"
  default = ""
}

variable "gcp_credentials_file" {
  description = "Full path to the JSON credentials file"
  type = "string"
  default = "../gcp_compute_key.json"
}

variable "gcp_ssh_key" {
  description = "Full path to the SSH public key file"
  type = "string"
  default = "../../.ssh/lab_ssh_key.pub"
}

Save the file and exit the text editor.

Initialize the Terraform providers

Type the following command to initialize any Terraform providers specified in the plan files.

$ terraform init

Deploy the VM-Series firewall

Type the following command to perform a dry-run of the Terraform plan and gather its state data.

$ terraform plan

Type the following command to execute the Terraform plan. You can append --auto-approve to the command in order to avoid the confirmation step. This will deploy the VM-Series instance in GCP. This will take a few moments to complete.

$ terraform apply

Copy and paste the output fields (in green) into a note or document on your laptop. You will need this information later.

Update the SSH config

Use the following gcloud compute command to override the default GCP key management process and utilize our SSH key.

$ gcloud compute config-ssh --ssh-key-file=~/.ssh/lab_ssh_key

Set the firewall administrator password

Use the gcloud compute command to get the hostname of the VM-Series firewall instance.

$ gcloud compute instances list

SSH into the firewall using the fully qualified hostname of the instance. You may need to wait a few minutes for the firewall to finish booting up. If you receive a Connection refused response or are prompted for a password the VM-Series instance has not fully booted yet. Hit Ctl-C and wait few moments before trying again.

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NOTE: Feel free to read the Terraform Background section to learn more about Terraform while you're waiting. :-)

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$ ssh admin@<INSTANCE>.<ZONE>.<PROJECT>

Once successfully logged in and presented with a CLI prompt you must set the administrative password for the VM-Series firewall.

admin@PA-VM> configure
admin@PA-VM# set mgt-config users admin password
admin@PA-VM# commit
admin@PA-VM# exit
admin@PA-VM> exit

Launch a separate web browser tab and log into the VM-Series web user interface using the external IP address of the VM-Series instance.

You are now ready to begin the Terraform portion of the lab.