Nick Hardiman gives you the step-by-step procedure for creating and then destroying a cloud server from your HP Cloud account.
I want to start my first HP Cloud machine, check that it works, and then clean up by destroying the things I created.
The HP Cloud service recently opened up to the general public. I created an account and got as far as the home page of the HP Cloud console. The console is the self-service control panel for controlling HP's cloud compute and storage.
The procedure
This procedure has dozens of steps and covers a lot of ground, but won't actually take very long.
Activate an availability zone.I can only create a VM (Virtual Machine) in the US West region. Since these zones are all in the USA and I am in Europe, I won't be able to start a virtual machine in my country.
- Open the HP Cloud console.
- Log in. A Dashboard page appears.
- Pick an availability zone. There are three, all listed as US West.
- Click the Activate Now button. You are redirected to an Account page. Unlike AWS, HP Cloud lets you open an account without adding credit card details. Now I want to rent services.
- Enter personal details. This part of the process is handled by the e-commerce company Zuora. You are returned to the dashboard. A confirmation message appears in your inbox.
- Pick a Compute Availability Zone. It doesn't really matter which one. Multiple availability zones are used to stop an outage bringing down a cluster of servers.
- Click the Activate Now button. This time, instead of an Account page appearing, a modal window pops up. It displays a progress bar while the service is initialized in some magic way behind the scenes. The Compute page appears, showing the Activate Now button has turned into a Manage Servers button.
- Click the Manage Servers button. A new page with a Create Server(s) section appears.
HP, like AWS, uses uses public key cryptography to secure access to new VMs. I have to create a key pair before creating the machine. The HP Cloud VM builder will add my public key to my new VM.
- Click the Key Pairs tab. It's on the navbar underneath the Compute - US West Availability Zone title.
- Invent a name. I chose NicksKey. Type it in the Key Name field.
- Click the Create Key button. The key's fingerprint and the private key appear.
- Copy the private key from the page to a PEM file. This is required to login.
- Keep this PEM key file as safe as your house key.
- Click the Servers tab.
- Choose a Flavor. This is a list of a half dozen virtual machines, from small to large. I chose the standard.xsmall flavor to qualify for the free offer.
- Choose an Install Image. This list contains many OSs (Operating Systems), including CentOS, Fedora and Ubuntu. I chose Debian to make sure I am getting free software (I don't want to get tripped up by limited time trials, use limits or other tricky licensing).
- Ignore the Security Group. The default allows SSH access, and that's all I need to test the machine is working.
- Check the Key Pair field shows the name of your new key pair.
- Ignore the Tags field. It's optional.
- Click the Create button. A new line appears in the Running Instances section. The first Status column says something like Build(networking).
- Wait a minute while the HP Cloud VM builder does its work. The Status column changes from Build(spawning) to Active.
This part of the work uses the CLI (Command Line Interface).
- Find the Public IP address.
- Connect to the VM with the private key and PuTTY.
- Click the link in the Instance column. A Server Details page appears.
- Destroy the new VM. Click the big red Terminate button.
- Destroy the key pair.
- Log out.
- Close the HP Cloud console.
If something goes wrong, click the information tab on the right. This gives a summary of any problems with HP Cloud.
Note: I had no luck creating VMs in Availability Zone 1 for a while. I moved onto Zone 2 and that worked fine.
See the related gallery, for more screenshots and a summary of the steps, including creating your HP Cloud account.