As part of the Virtual Design Master competition I’ve taken the opportunity to play with something I have been meaning to look at for while; Cloud Foundry. You can set this up locally to start playing with it by using Pivotal’s local version of Cloud Foundry; PCF Dev.

1. Make sure your processor is capable of hardware assisted virtualisation and this feature is turned on. You can use the free tool SecurAble to tell you the current status. If its not enabled, you’ll need to enable it in your computer’s bios.
2. Install Virtualbox
3. Create a Pivotal Network account
4. Download and install PCF CLI
5. Download PCF Dev
6. Run the pcfdev executable from the command line so you can see if it generates any errors or if it is successful. If successful it will show the following;
7. You can check the status of PCF Dev by running “cf dev status”;
8. To create the PCF Dev environment, run “cf dev start”. You’ll need your Pivotal Network credentials to start the setup. This command downloads a roughly 4.5GB OVA from Pivotal and starts it in Virtualbox.
9. Once its done and its completed successfully you’ll see the following;
10. You can then access PCF Dev via the command line using “cf login -a https://api.local.pcfdev.io –skip-ssl-validation”
11. Or you can access it via your web browser using https://local.pcfdev.io

I did struggle to get PCF Dev running at the cf dev start phase. This turned out to be an issue with my local firewall (Bitdefender), which I had to disable temporarily.

That’s it for now, next step is to get something running in PCF Dev.

Cheers

Chris