We’ve recently added the option to import customer-supplied Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs) to our object storage offering. This is a great option for our customers who may have special virtual machines that they have spent hours perfecting. Since learning to import these images can pose a slight challenge, especially for those unfamiliar with object storage (OpenStack Swift), I wrote this blog to share scripts that will streamline the process.
Both the Bluemix VPN service and the Bluemix Gateway service allow you to connect a Bluemix environment to an existing infrastructure in a very simple, secure, and straightforward manner. While the documentation on how to setup both of these services is well-organized, there isn’t very much information available on the performance of these services. So I setup a little experiment to attempt to get a rough idea of how well each service performs, and I got some very promising results in the process.
In order to fully utilize the power of your Bluemix account it is recommended to install the Cloud Foundry and Bluemix command line clients. This guide will walk you through that process as well as some of the basic command line options.
Please see our Knowledgelayer Guide on how to install the Cloud Foundry CLI.
One of the great things about being in a connected world is the ability to have private only systems talk to each other through gateway devices. Today you will look at using the Bluemix VPN Service connected to a SoftLayer Vyatta Network Gateway Device to enable communication between Private-Only Bluemix containers and SoftLayer instances.
In this article we will go over a few of the more common billing related API questions we have received, and provide some REST examples on how to gather information from the SoftLayer API. Being able to understand the SoftLayer billing API can be key to planning your budget, as well as tracking usage and spending trends.
Before we begin I find it helpful to set some environment variables so that we don't have to provide our SoftLayer user and API key in every call. In your terminal run the following, substituting in your Portal username and API key:
Load Balancing is a way to distribute processing and communications evenly across multiple servers within a data center so that a single device does not carry an entire load. SoftLayer Load Balancing enables customers to employ a variety of balancing methods to distribute traffic, including persistent and non-persistent options, that can be changed, activated and deactivated at any time. Today we are going to look at how to use the Python slcli client to manage your SoftLayer Local Load balancers.
In light of the upcoming legacy storage device End of Life preparation, this how-to for mounting object storage as a drive in your Windows server can help ease the pain.
The ability to order bare metal servers is one of the unique advantages of the SoftLayer cloud. But bare metal servers are inherently more complicated than virtual server infrastructures (VSI) because there are many more choices. A subset of the common bare metal servers can be ordered fairly easily using the SoftLayer_Hardware::createObject method. If that’s sufficient for you, you can stop reading this article right here.
When we launch a new data center, we try to keep everything as consistent as possible between locations. We use the same hardware, we have a skilled “Go Live” team to bring everything online, and we train our local operations staff the same way. When we open a new data center in Dallas, that’s easy. But when the new facility is on the other side of the planet, things can get a little more complicated.
SoftLayer iSCSI storage is a great platform for running a clustered OS and file system. Featuring Multipath I/O (MPIO), industry leading durability, and our global footprint, the Endurance and Performance iSCSI block storage products are a great fit for a variety of workloads worldwide.
