Reliable with simple APIs
Updated February 06, 2024
Reliable with simple APIs

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers are being used as a pilot project to extend our data center used by researchers. In other words, extra jobs that cannot be fulfilled by our data center will be offloaded to IBM VSI. Currently it is being used by one department but it will be used by the entire university once the solution is stable and goes into production.
Pros
- Fast to spawn
- Easy to configure using SoftLayer APIs
- Many flavors available
- Relatively cheap, especially for the transient instances
Cons
- The IBM Cloud Web UI is very slow and not responsive
- It would be nice to provide a direct way to choose a template image when creating a VSI
- It would be nice if transient VSIs can be resized (CPU and Mem)
- It will reduce the time researchers have to wait to be assigned computing respources
- It will reduce the current operational costs
- It provides "infinite" increase of our data center
We are only using transient VSI to reduce the cost. While IBM can reclaim the instance at any time, this almost never happens to us. A transient VSI would run for couple of weeks with no problems. It is also way cheaper compared to the on-demand instances. The only issue with IBM transient VSIs is that they are not resizable (CPU, Mem).
We didn't use reserved capacity as our main focus was allocating instances on the fly. While reserved instances can be low cost, transient instances have even lower costs and that is what we are using to expand the capacity of our data center on-demand while keeping the cost as low as possible.
We did not use dedicated instances.
- IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
The services are reliable and reasonably priced. IBM products are used to augment our data center capabilities and meet all researchers' needs.
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
IBM APIs are easier to use to create, configure, and destroy VSIs.
Do you think IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC's feature set?
Yes
Did IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC again?
Yes
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC Feature Ratings
IBM Cloud Support and Implementation
It was very straight forward and the implementation went smoothly.
Advanced - It was part of the subscription package we received when our organization signed up for IBM Cloud access.
There was once instance when all traffic to one virtual server was blocked. The firewall configuration was not well set and the support team troubleshooted the problem with us and walked us through the steps to fix the issue.
- Central Documentation and Learning Hub
- IBM Cloud Docs
- IBM Cloud product demos and tutorial videos
The documentation and Cloud Docs along with the demos and tutorials have helped a lot to get familiar with their new services and troubleshooting some of the issues we faced setting up the environment.
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers Pricing, Time savings and Efficiency
We use the transient instances to expand our data center on-demand and that cut in the average cost definitely helped us reduce our running costs and increase our capacity in terms of running more instances.
I don’t know how much time was saved, but I know time was definitely saved
Since we run transient instances on demand, the hourly rate is very beneficial to us as the instances get created and destroyed based on the available jobs. Thus, a monthly rate does not work for our model and only an hourly rate such as the one provided can work for our use case.
Using IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC
5 - Project management, technical leads, senior analytics developers.
4 - Computer science background with specializations in data analytics, cloud computing, networks, and data security.
- Fast on-demand deployment
- Test deployments
- Environment testing
- CI/CD runners
- Sample web applications
- Development sandbox
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