Accessing a Virtual Machine in Red Cloud

This blog post is an introduction to Red Cloud- a cloud computing service that is maintained by Cornell’s Center for Advanced Computing (CAC). Red Cloud is a private research cloud and can only be accessed by those with a subscription, but exploratory accounts are available for free for Cornell students, faculty and staff.

Subscriptions to cloud systems such as Red Cloud allow access to a variety of remote computing sources within seconds. Users can request instances, or virtual machines (VMs), of a variety of configurations ranging from CPUs to GPUs with varying amounts of RAM. In Red Cloud, users can access instances with up to 28 core and 240 GB of RAM. In this post, I’ll go through the very basic steps you need to access a VM through Red Cloud. These steps should generally apply to any cloud system that uses OpenStack as their cloud computing platform.

Step 1: Accessing OpenStack

OpenStack is a cloud operating system that will allow us to access the Red Cloud resources through a simple web interface. Log in with your CAC username and password (for the Reed Group: your credentials to access the Cube). This will lead you to an overview page that shows your usage of the resources.

OpenStack Login

Click on the Images tab. This shows the virtual machines that are available for use. You can access machines that have Linux distributions such as Centos (a -cuda means that these images can support GPUs) or Ubuntu. VMs usually have very minimal software installed, so there are also various images with pre-loaded software like Matlab.

OpenStack Overview Page

Available Images

Step 2: Creating a Key Pair

A key pair needs to be set up before launching to allow secure access to your instance through SSH authentication. You can create a new key pair under the Key Pairs tab.

Creating a Key Pair (Source: CAC)

Give it a meaningful name and copy the private key to a text file. Change the extension to a .pem file and store it somewhere convenient on your computer.

Step 3: Creating a Security Group

A security group allows you to control how you to specify what internet traffic can come from (ingress) or go to (egress) the instance. You can create your own, but for now, we will use Red Cloud’s default security group and add rules to that. Click on “Manage Rules”.

Overview of Security Groups

You’ll see a variety of Ingress/Egress rules already in the group.

Adding Rules to the Security Group

However, if you’re accessing a Linux-based VM, you will need to also allow access through an SSH command. Click on “Add Rule” and then choose “SSH” in the first drop-down menu and then “Add”. The SSH rule will now be listed as one of your rules. There are many options for rules including restricting access to only Cornell IP addresses etc.

Adding an SSH Rule

 Step 3: Launch an Image

Now we have all the tools to launch an instance. Under the Compute and then Instances tab, you will have the option to launch an instance.

Launching an Instance

Under the Details tab, give your instance a name.

Naming Your Instance

Under the Source tab, choose your instance. I’ll go with the latest stable version of Ubuntu and then click the up arrow.

Choosing an Image

Then, choose your flavor. It’s recommended to start with the lowest RAM (8GB), especially if you are just starting to explore cloud computing. You can always scale up when your image is launched if you need to.

Choosing a Flavor

Under the Security Group tab, check to see that the default security group is selected. Then choose your key pair under the Key Pair tab. Great, now we can launch the instance by clicking the blue “Launch Instance” button.

The instance will go through a variety of tasks until it stabilizes at “Running”.

Instance Status

Now we can SSH into our remote server using the IP address that is listed for the instance. I’ll use MobaXterm to start a local terminal and navigate into the directory where I saved my private key. Use the following command, inserting in the IP address of your instance and the name of your key.

SSH-ing into the Ubuntu VM

Now we’ve entered into our Ubuntu machine and we can interact with it using the command line. Enjoy!

Ubuntu Image!

Once you are done, make sure to either shelve (if you want your disk contents to be unchanged) or delete your instance. Even if the machine is idle, this prevents it from being used by other users, so you will still be billed.

Shelving an Instance

In the next tutorial, I’ll describe Docker and how you can use VMs to run containerized code.

Acknowledgements: Much of the information shared in this tutorial comes from many conversations with staff at CAC, particularly Peter Vaillancourt and the Red Cloud wiki.