blink

[M_Ruszkowski]

Hi,   There doesn't seem to be an image for blink that works for openserver?  Is there a special or different image that i need to use?

Thank you,

[PhoneBoy]

Pretty sure Blink is only supported on Check Point appliances.

[M_Ruszkowski]

I understand and that is what I thought.  However we heavily leverage VM to test everything from CheckPoint to F5, and other appliances that we use in PROD.   Our Lab and lower level environments that are used for POC and testing are mostly virtual based.   Then you go to CPX and sometimes you see little demos ran on Intel Nooks.   With that said, we spin up VM's for our GW and MDS then do restores.  This way we can validate new features and test before going to PROD devices.  As for blink, I would like to be able to test this in a VM environment.  Make sure our answer.xml is correct, make sure our post scripts are executed correctly.   This is how I test CDT as well.  I am getting of tangent.   But I just don't understand CheckPoint's thought process when developing tools like blink and the images and not considering virtualization.  Especially in this time period.

[PhoneBoy]

That said, I didn't see anything to say it isn't supported on either VMs or Open Servers.
Did you actually try it and it didn't work, or was this just a question?
Either way, I'll clarify with R&D.

[M_Ruszkowski]

I built two VM's in the lab on ESX and set them up in a cluster.  I was using this to test the CDT tool and get the configuration tested.  Then I wanted to test Blink.  So i was using the --reimage option to see if i could blink the image back to R77.30.  Then I was going to try and blink them to R80.20.  So I only tried the R77.30 image and it failed with: "This image version is not supported on this machine".   Then  i went to the downloads and look for all the images and none of the descriptions mentioned openserver.   I was going to try the R80.20 blink image to see if maybe that will work on a VM.   I did give the VM's 100G of disk, and set the backup partitions to 40G so to have plenty of space.    

[Dov_Fraivert]

Blink requires a Gaia OS on machine. Thus, as long you already have a Gaia installed on your VM/open server you can use Blink.

It is recommended to use CPUSE that will show you only images appropriate for your machine.

[Tsahi_Etziony]

Hi Michael,
Did you notice that for R77.30 there are two GW Blink images? I think you might have used the wrong one and that's why you got the "This image version is not supported on this machine" error.
Plus, if your machine has access to the cloud, using the CPUSE WebUI page would be the best bet, because it would only show you the valid images, including Blink images (As Dov also replied).
Please let me know if you got this working. If you still can't Blink your VM, I would like to contact you privately and try to figure out the nature of the problem.

[M_Ruszkowski]

Thank you for the information.  I will try this again and let you know the results.

Thank you!

[M_Ruszkowski]

You were correct for R77.30 i had used the wrong image.   I also tested R80.20 and it worked as well in the VM.

Thank you for the help.  

Then I tried this on a GW that was previous configured and running R77.20 used the "--reimage" flag.  I noticed that after the reboot the GAiA configuration was still there.  I did not look at it fully to see if everything was copied over, however I did notice that interfaces and routes were definitely carried over.  I was blink'ing this to R80.20.  Is this to be expected that part of the configuration gets carried over?  I was expecting a clean build.   

[Tsahi_Etziony]

Only basic and necessary configuration is migrated when you reimage a machine using Blink, just like when you perform CPUSE clean installation (as opposed to CPUSE upgrade which migrates all the configuration).