Please see below for a demonstration of the ElasticStack cloud platform in action with ElasticHosts. This shows the easy-to-use web control panel that you can rebrand and adapt for your own customers.
We are happy to arrange personal demonstrations of the ElasticStack cloud platform back-end. Please contact us at sales@elasticstack.com.
- Join the free cloud hosting trial
- Open control panel
- Start a server, connect via VNC
- Manage servers online
- View server desktop
- Scale cloud servers in seconds
- Add a hard drive
- Install from image, disk or existing drive
- View server boot
- Why cloud computing is different
- Join the free cloud hosting trial
Cloud platform demo
Welcome to ElasticHosts! This video shows how to run servers in the ElasticHosts cloud. I will demonstrate how you can create, start and resize cloud computing servers all within seconds, taking advantage of our on-demand capacity.
I'm using a standard trial account to demonstrate this. Sign up for the free cloud hosting trial on our website and try out everything I'm about to show you.
Join the free cloud hosting trial
[0:30] Let's get started. The first thing I'm going to do is open a web browser and go to the ElasticHosts website. Here's the home page, and as you can see you can sign up for a free cloud hosting trial account here.
I already have one, so I'm going to log on to my account. I get given a choice of datacentres at this point. My account is in the London Peer One centre, so I'll go there.
At the login page, I'm going to enter my email address and the password for my account, click on log in, and that brings me to the account control panel.
Open control panel
[1:08] The account control panel is where you carry out the majority of the tasks within your account. You can stop and start cloud computing servers, and create and manage the drives that you install the servers on to.
I've got one server here to start with. It's called 'demo' and it's running a Red Hat Fedora live CD. So let me start by turning that on.
Start a server, connect via VNC
[1:30] So that server has now started. It's connected to the public internet, at an IP here. We provide VNC remote desktop access to all our servers, so the first thing I'll do is log on to that server over VNC and see it boot. I'm going to use TightVNC, a VNC Viewer for Windows.
When I bring that up, I type in first of all the IP address, and secondly the password, which you can see on the account page. That brings me into the virtual desktop of the server, where I can see the server booting up through its first stages.
Manage cloud computing servers online
[2:15] Now let me just minimise that while I talk through some of the features and we'll come back to it. What you see here is a server called 'demo'. It's running with CPU of 2000Mhz, so that's one core with 2Ghz, or two cores with 1Ghz each. It has a gigabyte of RAM, and it's running with a Red Hat Fedora live CD in the drive.
That's essentially a managed drive, so we don't see it in the control panel. If it were one of our own drives, we'd see a separate icon in the control panel for the drive itself.
View server desktop
[2:57] Now let's look at that server and see how it's getting on. While we've been talking, that server has been booting.
If we start the VNC viewer again, we now have a view of the desktop of the booted server. We have full access, just as we would with a physical machine. We can use the menus, we can go and look at the disk - we have full access, just as we would with a physical machine.
Scale cloud servers in seconds
[3:23] Let's go back to the management system. That server we started had 2Ghz of CPU and 1000MB of RAM. But we might want to scale it up or down, and the great benefit of our system is how simple that is. So let's demonstrate.
I'm going to shut it down, and when it's shut down, I'm going to go to edit and more the CPU value and the memory value. I'm going to choose to set it to 1000 core Mhz, half the size it was, and 512MB of RAM, and then I'm going to start it again.
The whole process has taken perhaps 10 seconds, and that server is up and running again. If we logged in with VNC, we'd see it booting.
So that's demonstrated our scalability. But we've not demonstrated it with a real server, because this server has been on a live CD. A real server would have a hard disk where we could store our own software, databases and configuration. So let's do that.
Add a hard drive
[4:32] On the right-hand side of the page, you see a wizard for adding servers and drives, which is what we'll use next. So I'm going to add a server called 'test', a pre-installed server with Debian Linux 5 and a 3GB drive, and click on Add.
What you'll see this time is that rather than just a server on the left-hand side, you now have a server and a drive. Previously the server was running off a central drive, the CD image for Red Hat Fedora. Now we've got a drive in our own account for storing our own data that's unique to us.
So here we have a server called 'test', with 2000 core Mhz and a gigabyte of RAM. It's running off a drive called 'test'. We also have the drive itself in our account, with 3GB of drive space, and it's imaging off the Debian image we asked for. If we refresh that we'll see it making progress.
Install from image, disk or existing drive
[5:31] While our new server is imaging, let's talk about the options available when you're adding new instances.
- You can add a server, or a drive only. When you add a server, you get the drive and a server that's set up to boot from that drive. When you add a drive, you just get the drive.
- You can supply a name, which applies to both options: just the drive, or server and drive if you have both.
- Then we have a range of installation types:
- Pre-installed: take one of our standard images and make a copy of it onto a drive in your own account. We have Debian, Ubuntu, a variety of Linux and Windows images.
- Self-install from CD: here the server is running one of the CDs we have provided centrally, and it's also running a drive in your account. You install from the CD to the drive. We have a wide variety of Linux options: FreeBSD, Solaris and a variety of Windows trial CDs that you can install with your own licence keys or the Windows trial system.
- Boot from live CD: the setup you saw earlier where you boot off a centrally provided drive, as we saw earlier.
- Boot from existing drive: if you have a drive already and just want to create a server that uses it.
So that's a good range of options: you can set up servers and drives in the configuration you want.
View server boot
[7:04] Let's go back to the Linux drive we just created. If you click Refresh, we'll see that the imaging process has finished.
Let's click Start. As before, the server boots with an IP address, to which you can connect over VNC. You can see it booting right from the beginning: the BIOS, the kernel boot, all the messages, the various daemons go up.
That's a lot more than you'd see on a traditional virtualization system. You literally have remote desktop access right from the beginning of the install process, not just once the operating system is up.
Once that's started, it'll be a fully-functional Debian Linux system. You can shut it down and the data will be stored on the drive. You can reboot it again and the data will still be there, along with the configuration and the data and the software that you've installed on it.
Why cloud computing is different
[8:23] So let's recap. What have we done so far? We've started a server running off a live CD, booted it and logged into it with VNC remote desktop. We stopped it, scaled it down and started it again, which took 5-10 seconds - we could have scaled it up just as quickly.
Then, we started a second server running Debian Linux off a hard disk, not a live CD. We have that server running in the account now, and we could log into it with VNC in exactly the same way.
I think you can see how your hardware management in a system like ElasticHosts is so much more dynamic than it would be with traditional hardware.
You can log in and stop or start servers in five seconds; you can scale each server's capacity up or down, or run additional instances by adding extra servers. It's all very quick, very easy, and very scalable.
Join the free cloud hosting trial
[9:10] At this point, I definitely encourage each one of you to sign up for the free cloud hosting trial. It's very simple to sign up - it asks you for a name, an email and a phone number. You'll receive a password to that email, and be able to log in and do everything I've shown you yourself.
You'll experience that power of being able to create, stop start and run cloud computing servers very simply, flexing your capability as and when you need it, and do all this on a purely on-demand basis.
Good luck, and please do send us an email if you have any questions or comments. We look forward to hearing from you!
