Install and activate

CID222 ships as a virtual appliance. You size a host, import the image or boot the installer, complete a first-boot wizard, activate a licence, give the appliance a name and a certificate, and then it serves traffic. The whole path works with no internet connection; where an air-gapped deployment differs, each page says so explicitly.

Plan for four things before you start: enough memory, outbound access to your model providers (or a deliberate decision not to have any), a DNS name for the appliance, and the licence issued against its installation id.

What this guide contains

• Requirements and sizing — memory, CPU, disk and optional GPU, per package.
• Network prerequisites — the ports, egress destinations, outbound proxy, DNS and time synchronisation the appliance needs, and why the connectivity tests are not interchangeable.
• Install on VMware ESXi, Proxmox, Hyper-V, KVM/libvirt — one page per hypervisor. VMware and Proxmox are lab-verified; Hyper-V and generic KVM are written but labelled unverified.
• Install from the ISO — the boot menu, the DHCP-less path and the console checks.
• First boot and the setup wizard — every step, and what a failure at each one means.
• Licensing and activation — online, air-gapped, trial and renewal.
• Naming, DNS and TLS — the appliance CA, generating a CSR, uploading a signed certificate, and trusting outbound sites.
• Updates — the online channel and the offline bundle.
• Hardening, backup and restore, decommission — bringing the appliance into service properly and taking it out cleanly.

If a step fails

Every install page ends with links into the guided runbooks. The runbooks read the appliance's own diagnostics snapshot, so they work before you have an LLM configured and with no internet access.