Getting started with Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
With IBM Cloud® Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), you can use the UI, CLI, and API to quickly provision virtual server instances for VPC with high network performance. VPC infrastructure contains a number of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings, including Virtual Servers for VPC. Use the following information to understand a simple use case for planning, creating, and configuring resources for your VPC, and learn about additional VPC overviews and VPC tutorials.
Before you begin
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Set up your account to access VPC. Make sure that your account is upgraded to a paid account.
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Make sure that you have a public SSH key, which is used to connect to the virtual server instance. For example, generate an SSH key on your Linux server by running the following command:
ssh-keygen -t rsa
This command generates two files,
id_rsa
andid_rsa.pub
. The generated public key is in theid_rsa.pub
file under an.ssh
directory in your home directory, for example,.../.ssh/id_rsa.pub
.For more information, see SSH keys.
For a complete list of prerequisites for using the API and CLI, see Setting up your API and CLI environment.
Creating and configuring a VPC
To create and configure your VPC and other attached resources:
- Create a VPC.
- Create subnets in one or more zones. You can create subnets in suggested prefix ranges or in your own IP ranges that you bring to IBM Cloud.
- Attach a public gateway if you want to allow all resources in a subnet to communicate with the public internet.
- Configure an access control list (ACL) to limit the subnet's inbound and outbound traffic.
- Create virtual server instances with the core and RAM configuration that's right for your workload. By default, a boot volume is attached to the instance. For most virtual server instances the default boot volume size is 100 GB. The default boot volume size for a z/OS virtual server instance is 250 GB.
- If you want more storage, create Block Storage volumes and attach them to your instances.
- To define the inbound and outbound traffic that's allowed for instances, configure their security groups.
- If you want instances to be reachable from the internet, reserve and associate floating IP addresses.
- Deploy your service or applications across the instances.
- To distribute requests over multiple instances, create a load balancer.
- To enable your VPC to connect securely to another private network, such as your on-premises network or another VPC, create a virtual private network (VPN).
Next steps
To learn how to create VPC resources, see these tutorials:
- Using the IBM Cloud console to create VPC resources
- Creating VPC resources with CLI and API
- Using Terraform: Provisioning a virtual server instance in a VPC
For a general overview of the VPC infrastructure and related compute, networking and storage concepts, see the following topics: