How to launch Mikrotik CHR instance in Tencent Cloud

Tencent Cloud is one of the world’s leading global cloud providers. Through the extensive global infrastructure, Tencent Cloud provides businesses across the globe with stable and secure industry-leading cloud products and services, leveraging technological advancements such as cloud computing, Big Data analytics, AI, IoT and network security.

For the cloud computing resources, an image provides all the information needed to launch a virtual machine instance. Tencent Cloud provides generic public images to users for free. Tencent Cloud also allows users to create custom images, share images, and import images for their custom requirements.

MikroTik Cloud Hosted Router (CHR) is a RouterOS version designed for cloud servers. Mikrotik CHR is useful as a VPN server or client. It can also perform bandwidth shaping, bridging, and act as a firewall. Mikrotik CHR is ideal for use as an IPsec gateway device in a multi-cloud network. For customers who need to use Mikrotik CHR instances in their private network in the cloud, Tencent Cloud’s “import image” functionality doesn’t support importing RouterOS or Cloud Hosted Router (CHR) images by default. This article explains how to launch a Mikrotik CHR instance with Mikrotik’s raw image using Tencent Cloud’s “Service Migration” feature.

The high-level steps are:

• Launch a proper Tencent Cloud CVM instance according to Mikrotik CHR’s server requirements.
• Make sure the VPC, security group and firewall are configured correctly, so you can access this CVM instance.
• Download Mikrotik CHR raw image (.img.zip) and unzip it. (Or create your own raw image).
• Upload the image file (.img) into Tencent COS bucket. Make sure that you set “Public Read/Private Write” permission for this object.
• Use “Service Migration” feature to reconfigure the CVM instance with Mikrotik CHR image.
• Start up the reconfigured CVM instance and log into this instance with your CHR credentials.

Here are the detailed steps:

1.Launch a proper Tencent CVM instance according to Mikrotik CHR requirements. In this example, we launch a “S3.SMALL1” instance with 10GB system disk which meets the minimum requirements of Mikrotik CHR.

2. Make sure you can log into this instance. This is mainly to make sure that the network security configuration is in place.

3. Download Mikrotik CHR raw disk image. (You can also create a raw image of your own CHR instance)

4. Unzip the downloaded file (Skip this step if you use your own raw image file). i.e., unzip chr-6.42rc30.img

5. Upload the image file (.img) into Tencent COS bucket. Make sure that you set “Public Read/Private Write” for this object. If you haven’t created an object storage bucket yet, please follow this instruction to create a COS bucket.

6. Use “Cloud Virtual Machine” -> “Service Migration” -> “Create an instance migration task” feature to reconfigure the CVM instance with Mikrotik CHR image.

Note: Use the image COS Object address for the “COS link” field.

7. Wait for the migration to complete successfully. Go to the instance list, find the instance and start it up.

8. Once it is started, use your CRH credentials to log into this instance.
As default for RouterOS, the login credentials are as follows:
- Username: admin
- Password: blank (leave empty)

You have successfully deployed a Mikrotik CHR instance into your Tencent Cloud environment.

Author: Jianhe Liao
Jianhe is a certified Tencent Cloud, AWS, and Google Cloud architect. He has more than 20 years of experience managing product development, pre-sales, services delivery, and customer success.