Prerequisite
This guide assumes you have a running RHEL server with access to the Red Hat repositories (repos).
Minimum Server Spec
12GB RAM
2 CPU Cores
220GB disk
Repositories
The repos are typically made available via two methods:
⦁ an active Red Hat subscription – typically used when RHEL runs on-prem, OR
⦁ Red Hat Update Infrastructure (RHUI) – available with cloud providers (e.g. Azure and AWS) to mirror Red Hat-hosted repos and automatically make them available to official RHEL cloud VMs.
Note: VT Writer requires port 443 and port 22.
VT Writer requires 'sudo su' permission to install correctly.
Note: Deployments have been tested on RHEL 8.
Deployments have been tested on VMware ESXi, vSphere/vCenter, Hyper-V, Azure, AWS
Dependencies
VT API and Writer .rpm has some dependencies (httpd, openssl, java) that are available in the Red Hat repos. They should be automatically installed as part of the VT API and Writer .rpm
PostgreSQL Install
PostgreSQL Database is mandatory. Although the rpm doesn’t depend on it, PostgreSQL is required. We support PostgreSQL versions 10 - 13 and recommend using a version minimum of 12. Here is an example install of PostgreSQL 12 using the PostgreSQL 12 module:
Install PostgreSQL 12sudo dnf module enable postgresql:12
sudo dnf install -y postgresql-server postgresql-contrib
Enter Postgresql bash shell and initialize the DB: sudo su - postgres
/usr/bin/postgresql-setup initdb
Exit the Postgresql bash shell: exit
Enable and start Postgresql service: sudo systemctl enable --now postgresql
Verify service is active: systemctl status postgresql
Deploying the VT Writer RPM
The VT Writer and API .rpm's are available to download here:
To verify that the download completed successfully you can check the md5 hash :
5c3a2a4284ffbcc0765411ac7c8aa46c visiblethread-api-0.29-1.x86_64.rpm
c80f388d55db5a7223bf5eb68affcf00 visiblethread-readability-3.3.1.1-1.x86_64.rpm
To install run the following commands:
sudo yum install -y visiblethread-api-0.29-1.x86_64.rpm
sudo yum install -y visiblethread-readability-3.3.1.1-1.x86_64.rpm
Details of how to set up and configure the server can be found here
Note: In the above document VT Writer is referred to as "VT Readability". This is the official name of the product prior to version 2.6.1