Skip to main content
Version: latest

Deploy VM From a Template

You can deploy a Virtual Machine (VM) using Palette's out-of-the-box templates or from templates that your organization's administrator provides.

Prerequisites​

  • An active cluster with the Virtual Machine Orchestrator (VMO) pack. Review Create a VMO Profile to configure the dashboard.

    • If this is an Edge cluster with VMs as Edge hosts, such as a VM in VMware vCenter, the VM Edge host must support hardware-assisted virtualization to the guest Operating System (OS).

  • Outbound internet connectivity for port 443 is allowed so that you and your applications can connect with the Spectro Cloud reverse proxy.

  • Users or groups must be mapped to a Virtual Machine Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) role. You can create a custom role through a manifest and use Palette's RoleBinding feature to associate users and groups with the role. Refer to the Create Role Bindings guide to learn more.

  • A namespace for VMs. Although you can deploy VMs from the default namespace, we recommend creating at least one namespace dedicated to VMs as a way to organize and manage them. To learn how to create a namespace, check out Create a Namespace.

Deploy VM from a Template​

These steps will help guide you to deploy a VM from an out-of-the-box VM template.

  1. Log in to Palette.

  2. From the left Main Menu, click Clusters and select the cluster in which you deploy VMs.

  3. Click the Virtual Machines tab.

  4. Select the appropriate namespace from the drop-down Menu.

  5. From the Virtual Machines tab that appears, click New Virtual Machine.

  6. Click the New Virtual Machine button. Available templates are displayed based on supported OS.

  7. You can deploy from a template or create an empty VM as follows:

    • To deploy from a template, select one of the VM templates. These can be Palette's out-of-the-box templates or templates that you or your administrator created.

    • To create an empty VM, close the templates choice page and install the OS using a different method.

  8. Give the VM a name and specify memory and CPUs.

    info

    You can change the memory and CPU values after the VM is deployed. By default, the hotplug feature is enabled for both memory and CPU, allowing changes to be applied without rebooting the VM through live migration.

  9. Optionally, you can enable the checkbox to start the VM automatically after creation.

  10. Click the Next button, which displays the YAML file. Tooltip help is available when you hover over lines in the file.

  11. Review the YAML file and click the Next button when you are done.

  12. Click Create Virtual Machine.

VM status will display as Starting for several minutes while the required resources are built and the image is pulled from the registry. If you did not enable the checkbox to start the VM automatically, VM status displays as Stopped until the VM is fully deployed.

warning

VMs do not self-heal. If a VM is running on a node that fails, the VM is re-scheduled to a different node. Similar to live migration, to provide high availability, the disks should be ReadWriteMany so that they can be mounted on other nodes when the VM is restarting.

Validate​

  1. Log in to Palette.

  2. Navigate to the left Main Menu and select Clusters.

  3. Select the host cluster that contains your VMs to view its details page.

  4. Click on the Virtual Machines tab.

  5. Review the list of VMs and ensure the new VM is displayed and has the status Running.

Next Steps​

Try installing your applications. If you did not install the QEMU guest agent as part of the VM deployment, you can install it now. The guest agent displays additional details in the Virtual Machines > Details tab.

You can update the VM configuration from the VM console or from tabs when you click on the VM. Learn about updates you can make in the Update VM Configuration guide.