Instances

Virtual machine instances

Instances represent a QEMU virtual machine on a specific node. Once created instances cannot be moved from to a different node.

Shapes

Shapes allow selecting a pre-defined resource size and a pool of nodes instead of a specific node.

Cloudinit Type

This should be automatically selected based on the selected image. Select BSD for FreeBSD hosts. This changes the cloud-init data format to a FreeBSD compatible format and provides a BSD build of the pci Pritunl Cloud agent.

Host Paths

A host path provides a high performance VirtioFS path sharing with the host. This is useful for providing persistent pod storage or sharing a path with multiple instances. Refer to the Nodes documentation on configuring the node to share a path. The node must make the path available to instances before it can be mounted.

VNC Server

The instance VNC server will run on a VNC port and through the web console with WebSockets. If the node running the web server is different then the node running the instance the node firewalls must allow 20000-25000/tcp traffic between the nodes. This will proxy the VNC WebSocket to the web server node.

Spice Server

The Spice server will typically only be available on Fedora installations. Most server distrubtions do no package QEMU with Spice support.

Desktop GUI

The desktop GUI option will run the instance with a OpenGL window. This will only work if the options are configured in the node settings and the node is a Fedora Workstation. This feature should not be used on servers.

Root Enabled

This option will enable the root user and generate a random password that will be shown in the instance info. This is useful for accessing an instance through VNC that has become inaccessible through SSH. This requires cloud-init to be working to update the root account.

UEFI

This will enable the UEFI BIOS for the virtual machine. All Pritunl Cloud provided images are UEFI, unless a non-UEFI image is added this option should be left enabled.

SecureBoot

This enables SecureBoot in the UEFI BIOS. This option will be automatically updated based on the selected image. Alpine Linux and FreeBSD do not have SecureBoot support and the option will be disabled when selecting these operating systems. For other images the option should be enabled unless the configuration requires disabling SecureBoot.

TPM

The TPM option will run a swtpm software TPM emulator on the host that is then provided to the instance. The TPM will work for Linux, FreeBSD and Windows instances.

DHCP Server

This will run a DHCP server on the instance network namespace to provide DHCP IPv4 address assignment to instances. This is useful when installing a custom operating system that does not have cloud-init support.

Public Address

The public address options control if the instance will be assigned public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. This can be enabled or disabled after an instance has been created.

Host Address

This controls if the instance will be assigned a host address. The host network is used to provide internet access to instances without public IP addresses. This option should remain enabled.

Skip Source Destination Check

This will allow network traffic that is from different addresses and networks. This can be used for VPN or network appliance instances to handle routing other traffic.

Node Ports

Node ports route either TCP or UDP traffic from a port in the range of 30000-32767. If two instances on the same node share the same node port IPVS will be used to load balance traffic between the instances. These are useful for instances that do not have public IP addresses.