Getting started with IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Virtual Servers

Try IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Virtual Server for IBM Cloud® Virtual Private Cloud. For more information, see Confidential computing with LinuxONE.

Using the IBM Cloud® Hyper Protect Virtual Servers service, you can provision virtual servers on a highly secure stack with an Ubuntu Linux operating system. On such a virtual server instance, you can run a myriad of Linux applications and containerized workloads.

This introduction informs you about the prerequisites for using this service. It points you to the process for provisioning a virtual server and informs you how to retrieve information about a created virtual server.

Finally, you find a reference to a description how to log in to your new virtual server.

Prerequisites

For an overview of the features and advantages of this service, read Hyper Protect Virtual Servers overview.

Before you start with Hyper Protect Virtual Servers:

Make sure that you have an IBM Cloud account.
If you want to use a Hyper Protect Virtual Servers paid plan, you require a Pay-As-You-Go account. To check your account type, go to IBM Cloud and click Management > Account > Account settings.
Check whether you are using the required browser software for IBM Cloud.
Have an SSH key pair ready, which you need for creating and connecting to your virtual server instance. Read Generating SSH keys for more information.

Provisioning a Hyper Protect Virtual Servers instance

You create a virtual server instance in a few steps from the user interface on the Hyper Protect Virtual Servers page. Read Provisioning a virtual server for detailed information.

Retrieving virtual server information

After you created an instance of Hyper Protect Virtual Servers, you can check the detailed information of your virtual server. Read Retrieving information about a virtual server for more information.

Connecting to a new virtual server

From your client workstation, you can connect to a virtual server that exists on IBM Cloud with its public IP address and your corresponding private SSH key. Read the information in Connecting to a new virtual server.

Managing user access

Access to the management of Hyper Protect Virtual Servers service instances is controlled by IBM Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) but the servers use standard Ubuntu user-access management. You can find more information here.

Securing your data

To securely manage your data when you use Hyper Protect Virtual Servers, you must know what data is stored and encrypted and how to delete any personal data. You can find more information about how to protect your data and the IBM Cloud network architecture here.

Protecting your Hyper Protect Virtual Servers

A Hyper Protect Virtual Servers server has two disks, "boot" and "data". The boot disk is always 25 GB. If your boot disk is full, the server can't start. You can't recover your instance because your boot disk can't be resized. The size of the data disk varies, and depends on your plan. Make sure that important data is persisted on the data disk. After the user password expires, you have 30 days to change your password. If you don't change your password within the 30 days, your account becomes inactive and you can't log in by way of SSH even if you are using SSH-keys. For more information, see Protecting a virtual server.