How to deploy OrangeHRM as a virtual appliance

If you’re looking to do a trial of OrangeHRM, one of the easiest methods is via a virtual appliance. Jack Wallen shows you how this is done.

OrangeHRM is one of the most widely-used open-source human resource management tools on the market. With features such as management for employee information, employee absence, recruitment, as well as employee performance evaluation tools and other features required for general human resources management.

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OrangeHRM is used by more than 1 million people across the globe in companies with single-digit and thousands of employees.

If you’re looking to test the waters of this open-source HRM platform, one of the fastest ways of doing so is by using the TurnKey Linux virtual appliance.

Let me show you how easy this is.

What you’ll need

To make this work, you’ll need to first download the virtual appliance from TurnKey Linux. You’ll want to make sure to download the OrangeHRM .ova file. You’ll also need a virtual machine manager. I’ll be demonstrating with VirtualBox, which can be used on Linux, macOS and Windows. If you’re using a different virtual machine manager (such as VMware), you’ll only need to alter the appliance import process for this to work.

That’s it. Let’s get to the deployment.

How to import the OrangeHRM appliance

To import the virtual appliance, open VirtualBox and click File | Import Appliance. In the resulting window (Figure A), click the folder icon, navigate to the directory housing the OrangeHRM .ova file, and select the appliance.

Figure A

Click Next and, in the resulting window (Figure B), make sure to edit the RAM option to something like 3072 (or higher).

Figure B

Once the appliance has successfully imported, select the OrangeHRM entry and click Start.

In the first interactive screen (Figure C), you must set a password for the root account.

Figure C

The root account is that which is used by the operating system (so for logging into the version of Linux used to host OrangeHRM). Once you’ve successfully added a root password, you’ll be prompted to create a password for the MySQL database user and the OrangeHRML admin account. After that, you can skip initializing the TurnKey Linux Hub service, and optionally enter an email address that will receive system notifications and critical security alerts, but you should definitely select Install for the latest security updates (Figure D).

Figure D

Once the installation of the latest security updates completes, you’ll be asked to reboot the virtual machine. OK that and then, when the reboot completes, you will be presented with a screen that includes all of the necessary addresses to access the OrangeHRM tool (Figure E).

Figure E

The primary address you use is simply https://SERVER (where SERVER is the IP address listed under Web). You will be treated to the OrangeHRM login screen (Figure F), where you’ll use the admin username and the password you set for that user during the deployment.

Figure F

And that’s all there is to deploying OrangeHRM as a virtual appliance. Although I wouldn’t recommend going this route for a larger business (as you’d want to do a full install of the software for that), deploying this human resources management platform as a virtual machine could be a great option for smaller businesses with fewer than 100 employees. Either way, this is a great method of testing OrangeHRM to see if it’s the perfect fit for your company.

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