Web In A Box's Cloud Infrastructure allows you to easily and rapidly deploy a new virtual machine to use for testing, development or production use. Most virtual machines can be created and ready to login within only a couple minutes.
This step by step guide will show you how to create your first machine. As our resources are charged on an hourly basis, you are free to login and create machines to experiment with our platform without incurring expensive monthly charges.
- Navigate to http://cloud.webinabox.net.au and login with your user details, which are the same as your Web In A Box dashboard.
- The Cloud home page will show a summary of the resources you are currently using. Select the "Build" button from the top right of the page and then select "Add New Virtual Machine"
Virtual Machine Properties
The first information required is to enter the basic virtual machine properties
Label - Your virtual machine will be identified within our cloud interface with this name. It cannot be changed later.
Hostname - This is the hostname that will be configured in the Operating System installation.
Password - This password will be set as the root or Administrator password to access the machine. You can leave this blank to have a password randomly generated.
Template
Select the operating system version and template you wish to use.
The most common choices are:
- Linux - Ubuntu - Ubuntu 12.04 (x64)
- Linux - RHEL - CentOS 6.3 (x64)
- Windows - 2008 - Windows 2008 Standard Edition R2 (x64)
A complete list of supported templates & operating systems can be found here.
Many templates come in both an x86 and x64 version. These stand for 32-bit and 64-bit installations respectively, we generally recommend that you install the x64 version of any template unless you have a specific requirement for the x86 version.
RAM & CPU Resources
Select the amount of RAM and number of CPU Cores for your virtual machine.
A guide on the recommend RAM, CPU and Disk resources for virtual machines can be located here.
Primary Disk
Select the amount of disk space for your machine.
This size is not fixed, you can shrink or expand existing disks as required with a quick machine reboot. Alternatively you can add a second disk after machine creation.
Swap Disk
Some templates require you to also create a Swap Disk, your machine will store information in RAM that is not currently in use if it needs RAM for other tasks here.
Windows templates will use space on your primary disk for this purpose and this option will not be offered.
Network Configuration
Network Zone - This should be left blank to choose the default
Port Speed - Most machines should be created with a speed of 100 Mbps, you can optionally select a 1000 Mbps connection, however this attracts an extra charge.
Automation Options
Enable automated backup - Selecting this option will setup an automatic backup schedule once per day, once per week and once per month with a retention of a single backup for each time period. You can setup more advanced backup schedules after machine creation if required.
Build virtual machine - You generally want to leave this option enabled so that your virtual machine is created and powered on straight away.
Boot virtual machine - You generally want to leave this option enabled so that your virtual machine is booted straight after creation.
Review & create serve
Review the proposed price, and select the "Create Virtual Machine" button.
Machine created
Your machine is now created and you can view all of it's details on this summary page. This is the standard view you will see when logging in to inspect your machine.
Activity Log
Scrolling further down the page you will find the machine activity log. This will show any running tasks such as machine creation, startup, shutdown and resource adjustments in progress.
This page automatically updates every 8 seconds, there is no need to refresh it. Wait for your machine creation to complete. The time can vary, as a guide linux machines will be completed within around 1 minute. Windows machines will take around 5 minutes.
Login to your machine
Your machine is now ready to use. You can login to your machine by using the password and IP address which are listed on the summary page as indicated below.
Generally for Linux machines you can use an SSH client to connect to the machine. For Windows machines, you can use the Microsoft Remote Desktop client.
If you cannot connect for some reason, or do not have a client available -- you can connect to your machine console by mousing over the "Overview" tab, and then clicking the "Console" option. You must have Java installed on your system to use the console facility.
If you require any further assistance with your machine, please contact support.