Orka Small Teams: Getting Started

Getting to know Orka Small Teams

Orka Small Teams is very similar to Orka, but has a few key differences. Namely, Orka Small Teams' defining differences are that the clusters are standardized and slimmed down to the bare resources that are needed.

  • 1 x Master Node
  • 2 x M2 Mini Worker Nodes
  • 1 x ASA v5 Firewall
  • 500GB of Network Storage (Hard Quota)
    • Shared between Images and Shared VM Storage
  • Fixed & Predefined IP Scheme

Information about your cluster

You can find details about your Orka Small Teams Cluster by visiting the MacStadium Customer Portal.

Once you've logged in to your account, navigate to the Orka tab on the left hand side, this is where you will see your Orka Cluster(s).

You can click on your cluster to select it and view additional information including:

  • Service Details
  • Node Details
  • Firewall Information (IP, Username, and Password)
  • Storage Utilization
  • Orka License Information
  • Orka Controller Information

Connecting for the first time

  1. If you have not already, log in to the customer portal
    1. Select the Orka tab on the left
    2. Select your desired cluster.
    3. Navigate to the Firewall tab to obtain the information needed to connect to your cluster over VPN
  1. Use the supplied firewall credentials (as seen above) to connect to your cluster. They are in the Firewall tab
    1. Cisco AnyConnect
    2. Openconnect
  2. Once connected, you can interface with Orka most easily by reaching the Orka Controller through a web browser, you can find your controller's address in cluster's License tab in the customer portal.
    1. For Orka Small Teams, this will generally by 10.221.188.20
  1. Once you've reached the WebUI, you will need to create a user
  1. Select the button to do so, you will prompted for user information and the license key
    1. The Orka License Key will also be in the License tab of the cluster in the customer portal.
  1. Now that you're in Orka, navigate to the VM Configs tab on the left-hand side
  1. Select Create Config
  1. Create your config
    1. Name:
      1. 38 characters limit
      2. Only lowercase Latin alphanumeric characters and dashes.
      3. Begins and ends with an alphanumeric character.
    2. Base Image
    3. CPU Count
    4. vCPU Count (Use the same as CPU)
    5. Memory (optional, if left blank, will be automatically calculated)
  2. Deploy your config
    1. You can specify a node to deploy to specifically if desired, otherwise it gets assigned in a fashion that distributes load between nodes.
  1. Navigate to the VMs tab
    1. From here you can view the status of your VM(s) and connect to them
      Select the connect button on the right to see your options to connect to the VM (SSH, VNC, Screenshare)
  2. Congratulations! You've successfully connected and spun up your first Orka Small Teams VM! Keep reading for further information on getting started with Orka Small Teams!

Set up your desired method of interfacing with Orka

You can get started using Orka Small Teams using the following guides from our Orka Docs.

  • The WebUI is a quick and easy way to get started using your Orka cluster using a graphical interface.
  • The CLI is best for quick, one time commands, and is the quickest to get started with.
  • The API is best for more advanced users or complex use cases, such as those who wish to develop a custom in-house solution using Orka

Getting Familiar with Orka

The following Orka documentation is releveant to Orka Small Teams and goes over some of the most applicable topics from our Orka Docs to get started with Orka.

  • With Orka Small Teams, you are able to customize your image by adding any applications and implementing any configurations you want in a VM.
  • MacStadium provides only base MacOS images, we do not include any additional developer tools or programs. You are free to add these to your images yourself.
  • You can commit your changes to either the base image, or save the changes as a new image to preserve the existing image.
  • You also have 500GB of storage that can be used to store a number of images (dependent on size of image).

  • Our base image includes the latest version of our VM-Tools, which runs inside the VM. These tools are what allow Orka to interface with the VM properly.
  • When your cluster is upgraded, you will need to update the VM-Tools in your images manually or pull the latest image with the latest VM-Tools baked in.

  • Using the API you can accomplish any task in a programatic fashion

  • Using the CLI you can interface with the cluster in real time using quick commands and interactive prompts

  • This guide details VM Workflows and known limitations with VMs

  • This page page will help you pull logs from Orka for the purposes of both monitoring and troubleshooting

Getting started with CI/CD on OST

Pick you your set of tools and plug-ins to integrate into Orka, and then you can follow the CI/CD Quick Start Guide to get started using your Orka Cluster for CI/CD. Keep in mind Orka Small Teams only runs on Orka 2.4.1 or later, which means your Orka Endpoint will be at .20

Orka Downloads

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Known limitations

At the moment, only MacOS Ventura is supported

Apple Silicon Support

  • Orka Small Teams environments only consist of worker nodes running on Apple Silicon

Apple Silicon Limitations

  • There are some limitations in Apple Silicon, which inherently will be present in Orka Small Teams environments due to the fact that they only consist of Apple Silicon worker nodes.

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