I like to use IBM Cloud Object Storage to transfer large files (e.g., an OVA file) into the IBM Cloud infrastructure private network. Here’s how I do it:
- Order an instance of Cloud Object Storage if you don’t already have one
- Create a storage bucket with the region and storage class of your choice if you don’t already have one
- Create a COS service credential. To ensure interoperability with standard S3 tools, you should create an HMAC style credential. You can do this by adding an
{"HMAC":true}configuration parameter when creating the credential. - Download the S3 tool of your choice. I like to use the
awsclitool:-
pip install awscli- Edit the file
~/.aws/credentialsto specify your credentials created above:
[default]
aws_access_key_id=...
aws_secret_access_key=...
-
- Now you can use the
awstool to copy a file to your bucket and to generate a presigned URL that you can use to download it:
aws --endpoint=https://s3-api.us-geo.objectstorage.softlayer.net s3 cp filename s3://bucketname/
aws --endpoint=https://s3-api.us-geo.objectstorage.softlayer.net s3 presign s3://bucketname/filename --expires-in 31536000
# returns a URL that you can then use with curl - You can use this URL within the IBM Cloud private network to download your file. For example, I can SSH to an ESXi host and use
wgetto download an OVA file directly to my vSAN datastore. You’ll need to be sure to adjust the URL to use the correct private endpoint for your storage region.
The simple case is to deploy your virtual machines onto the logical switch and take advantage of the ESG to access the private and public networks. (Note that the ESG is initially configured with the sample NAT rule disabled, so you will need to enable it.) However, in our case study we want to deploy a virtual machine that will be used as part of the management stack to manage vCenter, ESXi hosts, and deploy workloads into vCenter. As a result, we prefer to have our virtual machine live directly on the private management network, but it will still need access to the public network, for example to download updates. This means we will need both to assign a private IP to the VM, and also to reconfigure the ESG to provide NAT from the private network to the public network.
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