Instances

An Instance is a virtual machine (or server). The Nectar Research Cloud has many physical hardware servers, known as hypervisors, which are then used as a pool of resources for creating virtual machines on.

Based on your requirements and quota, you can create Instances of varying sizes to handle your workload.

Launching an Instance

In the Dashboard, go to the left-hand navigation panel, choose Project -> Compute -> Instances. This window will show you any running Instances you may have, and allow you to launch new Instances.

Click the Launch Instance button to begin the wizard that will guide you through the process of launching your new Instance.

Choosing an Availability Zone

The Availability Zone field allows you to choose which site you’d like your resources to be created in. You do not necessarily need to choose an Availability Zone, but it may be important if you require certain features, or if you have a relationship with a particular site.

Choosing an Image

An image is a pre-prepared Operating System which you can use for your Instance. From the Source tab, you can see a list of all the available images for you to choose. We recommend using a Nectar Official Image, which we prepare with the latest updates and include enhancements to make them work well for the Nectar Research Cloud. They are prfixed with NeCTAR and are marked as Public.

For this workshop, we’re going to use the latest version of the Ubuntu Linux distrubution. Scroll down and choose NeCTAR Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic) amd64 by clicking the up arrow next to the item.

Choosing a Flavor

A flavor is a like a virtual hardware profile for your new Instance, defining how much virtual CPU, RAM and disk your Instance will have.

If you’re using a project trial, you’ll have enough quota for 2 virtual CPUs. For this workshop, we won’t need much, so choose the m2.xsmall. This will give you:

• 1 Virtual CPU
• 2GB RAM
• 10GB of Root Disk

Selecting your Key Pair

From the Key Pair tab, ensure the key pair we created in the previous step has been set as Allocated. If it hasn’t, click the up arrow to move it from the Available section to the Allocated section.

Click the Launch Instance button to boot our new instance.

The new Instance should be created and go into the Build status. After a short period of time, it should then become Active. Take note of the IP Address as we’ll need this in the next step.