Planning for virtual server instances
When you're planning to provision virtual server instances for IBM Cloud VPC, use the following table to help you get the most out of your deployment.
Planning to provision virtual server instances
After a VPC is available, consider the following before you provision your instance.
The default VPC is selected automatically. If another VPC is not selected, the default VPC is attributed to the virtual server instance.
| Item | Considerations |
|---|---|
| Required IAM permissions | Make sure that your account has the required user permissions. If you have authorization as an editor or admin on a VPC resource, then you also inherit authorization to create, delete, and modify virtual server instances within that virtual private cloud. |
| Account limits | Check your account limits for concurrent instances. |
| 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 instance to connect to. |
| Profile | Consider the popular profile options of vCPU and RAM combinations for your workload. Profiles contain preconfigured instances that are ready to use in a matter of minutes. It's important
to make sure that your instances have the necessary resources to keep your workloads and your environment up and running. For IBM Cloud® Hyper Protect Virtual Server for IBM Cloud® Virtual Private Cloud instances and z/OS virtual server
instances, see s390x instance profiles.
Some profiles might not be available because the amount network interfaces in the virtual server exceed profile limits. You can remove network interfaces to select from more profiles. For more information, see Resizing a virtual server. |
| Operating system | Determine what operating system image to select for your instance. You can choose a stock image, a custom image from your account, or a custom image that was shared with your account from
a private catalog. For more information about custom images, see Getting started with custom images. If you plan to use Windows operating systems with SQL Server, see the About Microsoft SQL on VPC. |
| Naming | Make sure that you have a unique name for the instance. The instance name must be unique within an account and region. If you have a method to naming virtual server instances, it's much easier to filter and search on them later. |
| Network interfaces | Determine how many network interfaces that you need and which security group to attach to each interface. |
| Placement groups | Determine if you want to use placement groups. If you add an instance to an existing placement group, the instance is placed according to the placement group strategy. For more information, see About placement groups. |
| Boot volume size | Specify the size of the boot volume. The default boot volume size for most profiles is 100 GB. The boot volume size can be increased up to 250 GB. |
| Auxillary storage | Determine the number of auxiliary storage volumes that you need and their capacity. You can attach up to 12 data volumes to your instance. |
| Bandwidth allocation | Instance bandwidth is distributed between networking and storage resources. If you do not specify the initial volume and network bandwidth allocation, then 25% of total instance bandwidth is allocated to volume bandwidth and 75% is allocated to network bandwidth. The network bandwidth allocation is distributed evenly across network interfaces, and each network interface has a cap of 25 Gbps. The storage bandwidth is divided between the boot volume and the attached data volumes. To ensure reasonable boot times, a minimum of 393 MBps is allocated to the primary boot volume. The remaining bandwidth is divided proportionally between the attached data volumes based on their provisioned size and IOPS setting. The storage bandwidth allocation changes only if and when a data volume is attached or detached. |
| User tags | Decide what user tags you might want to add during instance provisioning. You can add user tags identify the instance, the boot volume, and any data volumes you create and attach during instance provisioning. |
| Connectivity | For IBM Cloud® Hyper Protect Virtual Server for IBM Cloud® Virtual Private Cloud instances, make sure that you either enable a public gateway in the subnet, or reserve a floating IP address and associate it with the network interface of the instance just after instance creation. |
Next steps
When you're ready to get started, see the following tutorials: