Lesson 3 · Provisioning

Deploy a VM & Hyperconverged Virtualization

With the components and choices in hand, it's time to actually deploy a virtual machine — and to understand the alternative to piecing compute together at all: hyperconverged infrastructure.

3.8

Deploy a Virtual Machine

The exact process varies by cloud provider and VM type, and permissions and access controls still govern instance management throughout — depending on settings, you may be able to over-allocate resources. Here are the general steps for deploying a t2.micro general-purpose instance on AWS. Click through each step.

STEP 1

Launch Instance

STEP 2

Name it

STEP 3

Choose OS

STEP 4

Instance type

STEP 5

Keys, network, storage

Launch Summary

Instance namenot set

Operating systemnot set

Instance typenot set

Key pairnot set

Networknot set

Storagenot set

Other cloud vendors — VMware, Oracle, Azure — offer their own instance sizes tuned for specific purposes, following a similar overall shape even where the exact screens differ.

INFO — This procedure demonstrates the types of information you'll need when deploying an instance. It does not define the detailed step-by-step instructions, which vary among AWS, Azure, GCP, and other cloud service providers.

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3.9

Hyperconverged Virtualization

Converged virtualization combines CPU, memory, storage, and network configurations into a single entity — but the four components stay independent and can still be separated. Hyperconverged virtualization combines the same four subsystems far more tightly, to the point where they can't be pulled apart.

Hyperconverged deployments run on off-the-shelf hardware, which makes them well suited to private clouds and organizational data centers — easier to deploy and maintain because the entire structure is managed as one unit, rather than specifying individual CPU, GPU, memory, storage, and network components separately.

StarWind

Hyperconvergence appliances

Nutanix

Software-defined architecture for hybrid HCI environments

VMware

HCI hybrid cloud solution working with vSphere

Dell

VxRail hardware systems

Worth keeping straight: a hyperconverged environment combines CPU, memory, storage, and networking technologies — it isn't a setting on any one of them. Provisioning cloud resources is mainly about deploying virtualized resources like these, but plenty of other concerns still come into play when planning and deploying cloud services.

§ 3.8–3.9 · Deploy a VM & Hyperconverged Virtualization