Once you have your account verified and your login information on your e-mail, you are ready to start operating City Cloud through our easy-to-use web front-end.
You can access the City Cloud Control Panel through:
http://admin.citycloud.eu
Once inside the control panel, you have several sections:
VM
Here you can access all the servers available to you. You have three subsections, “Running VMs”, “Powered-off VMs” and “Paused VMs” which are self explanatory.
By hovering the corresponding server row, you will be able to access all the options related to that virtual machine. The options may vary whether they are running, paused or powered off.
Running VMs options:
- Power off: Shutdowns the virtual machine, this issues a standard power-off command to the operative system.
- Pause: Pauses the VM. Once the server is paused, it doesn’t consume CPU but it does use memory. You can resume the machine state at any time. This powerful option is much faster than shutting down/starting and also gives you the ability of resuming right where you left the server.
- Remote Console: Here you can access your VM remotely through VNC. It will open up a pop-up and access the server through a Java applet. For that you need to have the latest Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed. Important: See Details and then Remote Console to find out the login credentials.
- Details: On the details window you have several tabs. On the General Tab you have basic server information as well as public and private IP addresses, here you can change the name of the server. On the Usage Tab you can quickly take a peek on how much cores, ram and storage space this particular VM is currently provisioning. Tags is used as a custom way of organizing your machines, for instance you could have a group with the tag “web servers pool” and another one with the “databases” tag. Remote Console gives you login information for VNC. On the Disk Tab you can see the hard disks this VM is using and also the currently mounted ISO on the cdrom, remember that in order to change the disks you need to power-off your VM first. Last, we have the Advanced Tab, where you have options related to power management and network and IO performance.
Powered-off VMs options:
- Start: Start your powered-off VM, this may take a while depending on several factors. The startup time is usually similar to a physical dedicated server machine.
- Delete: Permanently delete this VM. Use with caution since you won’t be able to recover the files after you have done this. On the other hand, use this when you want a specific VM to stop charging for disk usage. Remember, while powered-off servers do not have a cost in terms of cpu and ram usage, they do have a small fee for disk usage (depending on the amount of disks and size).
- Clone: Creates a duplicated VM with the same contents. This could take up to a few minutes (depending on disk size). Once the machine has been copied, it will appear on the Powered-off VMs section and you can start using it.
- Details: This is the same window that you get when clicking on “Details” on a running VM with a very important difference, you can change certain options to scale the VM up or down. You can change the number of CPUs and Memory, for that just change the “Hardware template”. Do so without worries since the option is not applied until you click on the “Save” button. You can also add network interfaces, add/remove disks, mount ISO images on the cdrom and change advanced options.
Paused VMs options:
- Resume: Resumes server normal operation.
- Details: Same details windows mentioned above. As running VMs, you cannot change any option until you power-off the server.
Logs
Usage
A key section to understand how much of your resources your are currently consuming. The stats shown here corresponding to all of your servers at once (as opposed to specific ones with the Usage tab on the VMs details Tab).
- VMs: Amount of VMs currently provisioned. Take into account that there is a fixed limit but we can take that up a notch for you, just drop us an email on the support page.
- CPUs: Cores currently running. Paused VMs do not consume cores.
- Memory: Memory used by running and paused servers.
- Storage: Disk storage used by your machines. Remember that disk space is allocated even when the VMs are powered-off. To completely release disk storage you need to use the delete option on the VMs.
App Center
Here you a selection of pre-packaged server images. All of these can be provisioned easily and are ready to go once you power then, usually with no installation required.
There is a variety of operative systems and we always try to keep them up-to-date. For more information on how to create servers from scratch or through the App Center, please go to the Getting Started – Creating servers page.
Please bear in mind that certain operative systems and packaged VMs have a separate monthly fee corresponding to the license. Such as Windows and others. You can easily tell which ones since they have the legend “You will be charged a monthly license fee”.
