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Planning for Bare Metal Servers on VPC

Planning for Bare Metal Servers on VPC

When you are planning to create a bare metal server on IBM Cloud® Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to host your VMware® environments on x86 architecture or your Linux operation systems on s390x architecture, use the following configuration checklist as a guide.

Table 1. Planning checklist to create a bare metal server
Item Considerations
Required IAM permissions

___ Make sure that your account has the required user permissions. You must be assigned the Editor role of the target resource group to create bare metal servers in this resource group.

  • For x86 architecture, you also need Bare Metal Console Administrator to access the ESXi Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) and Bare Metal Advanced Network Operator to modify IP spoofing and infrastructure NAT configuration on network interfaces.
  • For s390x architecture, only IP spoofing is supported.
    If you have authorization as an Editor or Admin for a VPC resource group, then you also inherit authorization to create, delete, and modify servers within that resource group.
Account limits ___ Check your account limits for concurrent resources. The maximum number of servers per account is 25.
Image
  • For x86 architecture, you can use the VMware ESXi image Licensed ESXi 7.x image.
  • For s390x architecture, choose an IBM-provided Linux image or select a supported custom image for BYOL (bring your own license).
SSH key ___ Make sure that your SSH key is available.
Location ___ Determine what region and zone to select.
Subnet ___ Determine which subnets that you want the server to connect to.
Profile
  • For x86 architecture, select a profile that fits your workload. Main considerations include the number of vCPU, amount of RAM, and whether NVMe drives are needed.
Naming ___ Make sure that you use a unique name for the server.
Network interfaces

___ Determine how many network interfaces that you need.

  • For x86 architecture, you can attach PCI and VLAN network interfaces to support the VMware networking topology. By default, each server is attached with one PCI network interface as the primary network interface. For more information about the bare metal server network, see Networking overview for Bare Metal Servers on VPC.

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