I recently had the opportunity to try out the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise (formerly known as Smart Business Development & Test on the IBM Cloud), which is IBM’s public cloud offering. I was so impressed at the ease and speed of setting up a new virtual machine (VM) instance that I thought I’d share my experience.
In my demo I decided to create an instance of a Microsoft Windows Server machine however Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server are also available as base-OS options. In fact, there are numerous VM images with various software stacks to select from based on your specific needs.
I was able to configure my new VM instance with about 5 minutes of effort as you’ll see in the video. In reality you’ll need to go have a quick cup of coffee as you wait for the system to provision your new VM instance. My experience for provisioning a Windows Server was under 30 minutes but this will vary depending on the complexity of the VM image you select and the volume of requests in the data center you select. However, when you compare the time it would take to procure a physical server and then install and configure an operating system and software stack it’s a drop in the ocean. Combine that with the ability to provision a high availability solution by deploying a fail-over VMs across multiple global data centers and the case starts to get even more compelling.
Watch the short demo below to see just how easy the process is and then head over to the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise page to learn more.
