Hi guys, today I’m gonna show you how to subscribe and get $200 worth of credit on IBM cloud, configure a Virtual machine of your choice – I will be using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 virtual machine instance for demonstration, setup ssh private and public key and remote login password-less to my machine on IBM cloud.
- Visit https://www.ibm.com/cloud – You can spend sometime to read on the various offerings and features IBM cloud offers compared to other providers Azure / google / Amazon
- Sign up with your email address for a free account, the free account limits you to certain features (lite) until you upgrade to a pay-as-you-go account, so go ahead and upgrade to a pay-as-you-go account, you will be asked to provide a valid credit card for verification purposes, however no charge will be made on your credit card, except you decide to purchase additional services later. For this series we will only use the free $200 credit on our pay-as -you-go account to create our first virtual machine instance.
- Once done, login to IBM cloud, you will be presented with your dashboard, on the upper left click on the navigation menu. You can watch this video to have a quick overview on how to navigate the IBM cloud dashboard – https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/overview?topic=overview-ui
- From the navigation menu , click on “resource list” -> “Create Resource” , you will be presented with the Catalog dashboard, then we will select “compute” to configure our virtual server instance.
- Choose “virtual server”, and select the options you need for your virtual server instance, you can also see the order summary menu on your right.
- For this demonstration we will select the following specs:
Balanced B1.2×4, 2vcp, 4gbram, location Europe Frankfurt data center, RHEL 7 for the OS, free 25GB boot disk, free 100Mbps – total estimate 0.15 euro per hour
6. You have various options to select the different OS version for example Microsoft Server 2019, if you select the drop down menu, you will be presented with other versions of Windows as well – 2016, 2012, 2012 R2.
7. Another thing great about this order menu, if you select lower specs than the operating system can normally support, it will auto choose the minimum supported specs for your OS.
Verify your order summary, agree to the terms, and click on create
8. Once your virtual server instance is done provisioned, you can browse all the different functions and menu, make note of the public IP assigned to your VM, the passwords for admin login, billing starts whenever your machine is powered on based on the hourly rates on your order summary. If you go to manage button on your upper right of the dashboard, we can then navigate to billing items to see each associated cost for each an every component of our virtual machine instance. The term “suspendable” means, the item can be suspended and you will not be charged while it is suspended, for example when you power off the virtual machine, you will not be charged while powered off (suspended).
Also you may choose to receive notifications for spendings
Please stay tuned for next series which will be on how to remote access your new virtual machine on IBM cloud – let me know your thoughts and how you were able to get started on IBM cloud comments and discussion are welcome 🙂
Joshua Udofia - IT Blog 