How can I connect to IBM Cloud virtual server instances that have no public IP addresses?

Question

In IBM Cloud, I have provisioned a VPC, a subnet and a virtual server instance. I have not assigned any floating IP to the virtual server instance and wondering how I can access this instance? Is there any VPN or console I could use?

Answer 1

1. If your instance has no public IP address and you do not plan to create any other virtual server instance, you can use the VNC or serial consoles as described in the documentation .

2. Another option is to set up a bastion host in your VPC. You would use this bastion host as a jump server to access the private server instances. Typically you would only turn on this bastion host when you need to perform maintenance on the servers and turn it off once you are done. This tutorial walks you through the steps of creating and configuring a bastion host.

3. A third option could be to deploy a client-to-site VPN software on this bastion host so that you could directly access your private instances from your local machine without having to use SSH. This blog post describes this solution and provides a Terraform sample to easily deploy OpenVPN into an existing VPC environment.