Installing the A2 on bare metal
For high end, or performance intensive installations, customers often wish to install the A2 image directly on a bare metal server, instead of running it as a virtual machine. While this can definitely help achieve better performance and isolation of resources, please note that is for advanced users only, and may require a bit of Linux system administration knowledge.
If you are not comfortable administering a Linux server operating system on bare metal, we strongly encourage you to use the standard A2 VM image instead.
To install the A2 image on your bare metal server, you have 2 options.
- Use our ISO installer image
- Use a USB/SD card to clone the image to your server's disk
The ISO image option is the easiest, and recommended method. It involves downloading a small, bootable ISO image, and booting your server with it to install the A2 OS. The steps for this procedure can be found here.
However, the bootable ISO installer has limited driver support, and cannot always detect your server's hardware (disks, NIC, etc). If you find this is the case with your server, then you should use the second option instead. This will require either a USB stick, or SD card to perform, and the steps can be found here.