Setting up an IBM Cloud account

Create and set up an IBM Cloud account to burst IBM Spectrum Symphony workload to IBM Cloud. This topic provides a high-level guidance to what you need to set up an IBM Cloud account; for detailed steps, refer to your IBM Cloud documentation.

Procedure

Follow these steps to set up your IBM Cloud account, enabling IBM Cloud compute hosts to dynamically join the IBM Spectrum Symphony cluster to run workload.

  1. Access the IBM Cloud Customer Portal.

    Authentication in IBM Cloud now uses an IBMid. If you have an existing account, you might need to switch to IBMid authentication.

  2. From the portal, get your user name and API key details, which are required to connect to IBM Cloud. Typically, this access management information is on the users and API keys pages in the portal.

    You can use the default user or register a new user for host provisioning with IBM Spectrum Symphony.

  3. IBM Cloud automatically chooses a private network VLAN for your VMs. All compute hosts that connect to your IBM Spectrum Symphony cluster must use private subnets. Ensure that your cluster is configured to access these private subnets.

    If VMs must be provisioned into multiple private VLANs, enable private VLAN spanning in IBM Cloud, so that private network VLANs communicate with each other. Within IBM Cloud's network-isolated environment, customers are separated through their accounts. IBM Cloud assigns one or more VLANs to each account and does not allow private network VLANs in the same account to span by default.

  4. Decide on the image template that captures an image of a device. You can select a base OS image, or you can create your own image with the base OS and IBM Spectrum Symphony installed and configured. For advantages and disadvantages of either approach, see Cloud host provisioning options.
    • To use a base OS image, choose a public image from the console. Remember this image name to be defined as the imageID for IBM Cloud provisioning.
    • To create a custom image, order an IBM Cloud compute instance with the base OS image. Then, customize the instance by installing IBM Spectrum Symphony. For more information, see Creating a custom image in IBM Cloud.

What to do next

After creating your image (base or custom), configure a post-provisioning script for greater flexibility in managing your configuration. See Configuring the post-provisioning script for IBM Cloud.