Getting Started

About this task

HCL Informix® is offered as an hourly Azure image. An Azure Image is an image applied to compute and memory resources which Azure calls Azure VM. To place an order in your Azure account, navigate to Services > Azure VM. Click the Launch Instance button.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to Azure Marketplace.
  2. Search for HCL Informix and select the latest available version. (Delivery Method is Azure Image).
  3. Click on the Continue to Subscribe button and complete all selections.
  4. Proceed through the remaining steps to provision Informix Azure VM instance (virtual machine) on Azure.
  5. Connect to the virtual machine via a ssh program, using the private key for the keypair specified during your instance provisioning.

    SSH as the user “ubuntu”:

    $ ssh -i ~/.ssh/my_aws_private_key ubuntu@hostname-of-my-informix-azure-vm
  6. After you are logged into the virtual machine, use the sudo command to become the user “Informix”. 
    $ sudo -u informix bash

    As the user Informix, you will be able to run the various Informix commands, such as onstat, onmode, and oninit. The machine is configured with the Informix server running and listening to the following client types on the respective ports:

    Protocol Without TLS With TLS Installation directory
    Informix Server 9088 9089 /opt/informix/Server-Version
    WireListener(Mongo) 27017 27018 /opt/informix/Server-Version/bin/jsonListener.jar
    WireListener (REST) 26001 26002 /opt/informix/Server-Version/bin/jsonListener.jar
    Informix HQ Server 8080 8443 /opt/informix/Server-Version/hq

    To control the network traffic on the Azure VM instance (to and from), it is preferable to use the Azure “Security Group”, instead of an OS-based firewall configuration.

    For security reasons, the OS (Operating Systems) accounts on the AMI do not have a password, and the only account initially configured for inbound SSH is “ubuntu”. To allow a remote client to connect to the Informix database server you can set a password on the desired OS account or create a database user via the CREATE USER STATEMENT.

    Informix AMI can be ordered in all Azure regions and on all Azure VM types. Since Azure VM types have varying amounts of CPU and memory, several types and amounts of storage may be added to an Azure VM, tuning the Informix Server to meet your needs (E.g., altering the number of CPU VPs, increasing the size of the buffer-pool, adding dbspaces on the desired storage devices).