Introduction

The ViMa (Virtual Machines) service aims to provide to the educational and academic community access to shared computing and network resources that can be used for production purposes.

In particular, the service is addressed to the NOCs of GRNET's constituency or laboratories involved in national and European funded projects and have needs for computing resources.

In order to be able to ensure high availability, the service is hosted on multiple computing clusters on more than on Datacenters, while for the safe storage of data an external SAN unit is used. The network infrastructure ensures seamless connection to the backbone network and the commercial internet at very high speeds.

The service supports a variety of benefits tailored to the needs of potential users. Users are able to use the IP addresses of their institutions to virtual machines using L2VPN, as well as using IPv6.

The software chosen for the implementation of the service is based solely on open source.

Requests or clarifications regarding the operation of the service should be submitted to the support GRNET phone at 800-11-47638 or via e-mail to support-at-grnet.gr.

Instructions

To create a virtual machine, the applicant must fill out the form online accepting the terms of service.

In order to properly complete the application the applicant needs to submit information for all fields. Specifically, the contact details of the technical and the management personnel should be supplied. It must be stressed that after delivery to the applicant(s), the technical manager is the sole person responsible of management, proper operation and safety of the VM. As described in the terms of use, the purposes served by the virtual machine must be exclusively educational or research. GRNET will not to intervene in the virtual machine nor handle the services provided, however, if spambots or similar activity is reported GRNET holds the right to disable the virtual machine.

Next, the applicant must then fill in fields relating to the configuration of the virtual machine. First come the general computational requirements and the network requirements follow.

GRNET can provide a hostname of the virtual machine in DNS, if this is necessary. If the applicant wishes to register the machine's DNS service in a third party, by default GRNET provides reverse registration.

The existing infrastructure can accommodate a variety of operating systems. The applicant must choose from a list of pre-installed operating system.

Finally, for IP addressing are a number of alternatives. By default GRNET will assign an IP from an IP space dedicated to VMs. It can also provide IP addresses from a subnet dedicated to one or more VMs (/30 or larger) IP addresses from the IP space of the relevant institution using L2VPN can also be used. In the later case where the applicant should come in contact with the NOC to confirm the correctness of his choice and the availability of human resources needed to implement it.