“Any OS, any app, any time”, whilst not any sort of official slogan or mantra,
is a phrase that has been ticking over in my head for a while and sums up the
level of flexibility and agility we want to enable with Brightbox Cloud.
So, for the next step down that road, I’m pleased to announce the availability
of our Windows Server 2008 R2 official image for Brightbox Cloud.
It’s always been possible to build and run Windows images on Brightbox
(as with any PC-based OS),
but optimal performance requires the configuring of “virtio” drivers which can
involve a fair amount of effort, in addition to the overhead of managing
licencing. Our official Windows Server 2008 image deals with both of these issues.
Cloud Servers running Windows incur an hourly licence fee, in addition to the
regular hourly rate for whichever server type you
choose (e.g a “mini”). The billing system will automatically add the hourly
Windows licence usage to your bill separately, so you don’t need to do anything.
See the pricing page for full details.
Screencast and documentation
We’ve published a
simple step by step guide
which will get you running a
securely firewalled
IPv6-enabled Windows 2008 server in minutes, and John’s also recorded an excellent
screencast which I recommend you check out:
Try it now…
If you’ve not yet experienced Brightbox Cloud, now’s a perfect time to sign up!
- it takes less than 2 minutes and you only pay for what you use.
Eagle-eyed observers might have noticed that we quietly rolled out
IPv6 addressing into Brightbox Cloud over the last couple of weeks. In
fact, John’s Riak Cluster Guide used
IPv6 for direct access to the newly created servers.
With the global IPv4 address space approaching full capacity, we were
careful to design Brightbox Cloud to conserve public addresses. Not
all servers need to be routable from the Internet, so they are only
allocated private IPv4 addresses by default and you map public
addresses onto them when you need them (using
Cloud IPs). Of
course, Cloud IPs have lots of other benefits too, such as the ability
to instantly move them between servers and
load balancers.
So now, in addition to a private IPv4 address, Brightbox Cloud Servers
get a public IPv6 address which is directly accessible over the
Internet.
You can find your server’s IPv6 address using the brightbox-servers
show cli command, or by using the DNS name
ipv6.srv-xxxxx.gb1.brightbox.com:
$ ssh ubuntu@ipv6.srv-o7z2f.gb1.brightbox.com
Warning: Permanently added 'ipv6.srv-o7z2f.gb1.brightbox.com,2a02:1348:14c:35e1:24:19ff:fef0:d786' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
Last login: Mon Jan 9 22:41:21 2012 from from 2a02:1348:14c:c03:24:19ff:fef0:300e
ubuntu@srv-o7z2f:~$ ping6 -c1 ipv6.google.com
PING ipv6.google.com(bru01m01-in-x69.1e100.net) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from bru01m01-in-x69.1e100.net: icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=13.8 ms
--- ipv6.google.com ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 13.899/13.899/13.899/0.000 ms
IPv6 addresses available on all newly built servers, but you can
convert older servers by
snapshotting them
and building new ones from the snapshot (some older servers may have
IPv6 addresses already though, double check to be sure).
IPv6 is a winner even just as a way to access your new servers
directly without having to map a Cloud IP. But as IPv4 addresses
become
shorter in supply,
more and more systems will become reliant on IPv6.
Cloud IP addresses are still only IPv4, so you can’t move your IPv6
address between servers just yet, but we’re working on that :)