Flex Metal Clouds are full Private Clouds and the servers are 100% dedicated to your deployment.
This means all parts of the cloud are under your control and not handling anything but your cloud
system, your workloads, and your data. Setting up a Flex Metal Cloud takes about 45 minutes,
so we'll speed this up in a couple places. But I have a clock running right here,
so we can time this out. First, we've signed up already in Flex Metal
Central (http://central.inmotionhosting.com/). Central is where you can launch your Clouds.
Note I did say the plural clouds as we've made it trivial to spin up and down full Private Clouds.
We encourage people to have multiple smaller clouds versus one very large cloud but let's
get this provisioning kicked off. Here we have the choice of either a three-server small or
a standard cluster. To get started, as it says here, the Small is perfect for testing, training
in smaller production clouds. The Standard is the normal recommendation for most production clouds.
You can see the daily and the discounted 30-day price. It's billed by the hour for short-term use,
discounted after seven days of continuous use. You can also get significantly lower monthly
costs with one, two, and three-year agreements. Let's enter a name and description for this cloud.
Next, we need to add in a public key and indicate a budget limit. This daily budget will prevent
additions of hardware that would put this cloud over the budget. Let's just make this a hundred
dollars for now. Now, we'll attach payment information and we'll charge this to my card.
Usage is billed in arrears every seven days, but for new Clouds, we do need to place a hold
on the card for the expected 7-day bill. Check the terms box and let's deploy.
Alright, we now have a Cloud deploying. We can check out the documentation or head over
to see the progress. Let's go check in on the progress. Here you can see the new cloud listed.
Let's just go into Manage to see what's happening.
This is just a short welcome page while the Cloud is deploying. Each cloud is organized to have
additional team members, get support specific to this cloud, grow and shrink the hardware
footprint, and handle billing. For now, let's click on assets. Here we see we have some servers
and the power button column will be going from red to green as the boxes are turned on and booted up.
You can see we have inventory IPs and provider IPs already allocated. Each Private Cloud has
its own VLANs and blocks from the hardware side, and further, OpenStack will provide additional
networks using VXLAN to keep the various project networks similarly separated. Currently, the
system is setting up the highly available network storage that's provided by Ceph. Ceph is using all
three of the servers and will have redundant copies of your data on all three servers.
Let's switch to the command line now.
Here we'll do a "ceph status" on each node to see where they are.
The install of OpenStack is handled by our automation using open source
Kolla-Ansible. We can take a quick look at it by checking the logs for that deployment.
We're about 45 minutes in at this point.
Here you can see the deployment has completed let's pick up our Dashboard admin password now.
There's my password, and no I'm not blurring that out. Because a few minutes after this recording
I'll go ahead and destroy this whole cluster. It's really important to
note that with Flex Metal it's trivial to spin up and down Private Clouds on-demand.
Public clouds enjoyed the on-demand advantage over Private Clouds for many years and thus
charged a significant premium. The advent of on-demand open-source Private Clouds led by
the software and systems you're seeing right now change the playing field. Comparing costs often
lead people to disbelief on how much they've been paying. But let's leave that for another video.
Some hardware goes faster than others all of our core servers use high-grade SSDs
and these, in particular, are Intel Data Center NVMes.
So, really fast! Let's go back over to Flex Metal Central with our Dashboard admin password.
There's the "Launch Horizon" button. Alright, it's dropped us into a project which is how OpenStack
organizes access to the resources in this cloud. As the admin, you can create projects to give
out for self-service via a GUI, command line, or API. For automation, using tools like Terraform,
Ansible, and OpenStack's own Heat Orchestration. Here you see we can now create routers,
networks, and apply firewall rules through the Security Groups.
We can create VMs under "Instances"
and manage default OS's under "Images". We can create volumes and manage backups, and snapshots
of those volumes. You can deploy container clusters using Kubernetes, automate deployment
under "Orchestration" the list goes on as you can see. This cloud is ready to use right now.
Of note, now that the cloud is running you can also just click
"+Add Hardware" to trivially add additional servers to your cluster.
That brings us to the end of the Flex Metal setup process.
Thank you for your time and we look forward to helping you launch your
first Private Cloud and taking the first step in escaping the high costs of the mega clouds.