Definitions

In this article, we'll set up BlueSpice on the recently released Ubuntu Linux 22.04. The steps to get BlueSpice up and running include installing the Docker Community Edition on your system, configuring a persistent storage volume, preparing your SSL certificates, and finally deploying BlueSpice itself. Afterward, you will also want to ensure your container is running permanently by using a systemd unit file. This is the only way to ensure that a crash of the system hosting the BlueSpice VM can be compensated by automatically starting the virtual instance elsewhere and without requiring human intervention.

Preparing Ubuntu

This article assumes that you have just logged in to a freshly installed Ubuntu Linux 22.04 (for the first time). Docker has already made packages for its container runtime available for the brand new Ubuntu release, so the next step is to prepare the system for these and then install them.

As the initial step to prepare the system, add Docker's PGP key to the list of keys accepted by the Apt package manager as trustworthy. Only after this will apt download packages from the Docker repositories. To enable the key, use

curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg

To add the required repository definitions to your system, use

echo "deb [ arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) stable | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null

Then, apt update will update the list of packages known to your local package manager before finally downloading the required packages with:

sudo apt install docker-ce

Next, run sudo docker ps to check whether the Docker runtime is installed and running. You should see no output because there are no containers running yet, but there should also not be an error message.

Preparing Your Storage

A Docker volume needs to be created and inserted into the container to provide the container with persistent storage inside of the VM (remember to assure HA storage on the infrastructure level through network filesystems, NAS, or SAN). This is necessary because without a persistent storage device, BlueSpice data would disappear after a BlueSpice container is deleted and recreated. In fact, this will happen when updating the Docker container provided by BlueSpice. Hence, this article will assume that a storage device named /dev/sdb is available within the instance, that it is replicated outside of the virtual instance, and that said device is dedicated to BlueSpice usage only.

The next steps include a few basic tasks: First, create a partition table on the device with a single partition spanning across all of it, resulting in the existence of /dev/sdb1. XFS will be used for BlueSpice data, so the xfsprogs package will have to be installed next with

apt install xfsprogs

Then, a filesystem needs to be created on said partition, using

mkfs.xfs -L DATA /dev/sdb1

The -L parameter ensures that the new filesystem has a label that allows you to refer to the filesystem without knowing the full device path. This is relevant for the next step, which is to ensure that the XFS filesystem is automatically mounted at boot time. To do this, use

mkdir -p /srv/data

and the line

LABEL=DATA /srv/data xfs defaults 0 0

in /etc/fstab. Once done, mount -a should finally mount the XFS partition to the system, and the drive will be automatically mounted after a reboot. The final step is to allow Docker to create volumes on this device:

docker volume create --driver local --opt type=none --opt device=/srv/data --opt o=bind bluespice-data