Quick start Softlayer

So you’ve signed up and now you need to get busy doing something.  This guide is a quick start to help you navigate the bare essentials to safely start up your first environment in Softlayer.

This will be broken up in to the following sections

1. Free servers (sometimes)
2. Get your account and log on
3. Setup VPN access
4. To firewall or not to firewall
5. Ways to connect to your server

Free servers (sometimes)

First thing you want to do is visit www.softlayer.com and look to see if they are running a current promotion to see if you can get a freebie, the banner on the main page cycles to new information and new promos.  Currently the Brazil datacenter has just been finished so they are giving away $500 free in that datacenter.

Clicking that link will take you to a page that will give you the free code, in this case its 500SAO, you can press the order now button to start the quoting process at that data center or you can go to this Link to order a paid server.

Select the type of server you want to start with, either virtual or bare metal.  If you want a cheap hardware firewall for just this server it’s best to select it when choosing options.

Choose all of your required options and then order it, make sure you pop in that code if you’ve selected the qualifying data center.

Notice that the Prorated Initial Charge is $0.00

You will need to:

• Name the server and the domain (this is not an internet domain name)
• Read and agree to the Master Service Agreement
• Insert your contact information
• Input your billing information, including credit card number

Get your account and log on

Then you will receive 4 emails from Softlayer about variously bits and peices, the most important one has the title “Welcome to SoftLayer Dutch Holdings B.V. | Login Information”.  This email has your logon to your account, so get the userid and password and go to.

https://control.softlayer.com/

Logon with your initial userid and password, you will then have to change the password straight away, you need a capital and a special character and minimum of 8 chars.

You will be greeted with a Welcome screen that has useful links within the portal, I never read manuals and expect the interface to be intuitive so I ignore this page.

I’d suggest you have a snoop about to see where everything is yourself, lets start with that server that you just ordered.

Got to the menu bar at the top and select “Account“, “Sales“, “Orders”

Cool free server (for a month at least).

Well that will be 4 hours till it is ready so let fix your User account up.

Setup VPN access

Go to “Account“, “Users”

You will see only your account, notice that you have no VPN access, well that is an issue.  Click the “Actions” menu on the right side of your userid and select “Edit VPN Access”

In the VPN Access screen, set VPN Type to SSL & PPTP.

You only need SSL to connect via the web service, the PPTP is if you going to connect via another client, instructions on how to connect to PPTP in Windows here.

To connect to the SSL VPN, use Internet Explorer (pretty sure Safari works too) and go to http://www.softlayer.com/VPN-Access choose to connect to the data center that you have provisioned your service in.  When prompted to enter your VPN userid and password to the webpage and allow the activeX plugin to install.

Softlayer instructions can be found here.

To Firewall or not to Firewall

You’d be surprised the amount of people that think a server built in the cloud will be automatically protected…by magic.  Before you provision a server in any cloud you need to think about how you are going to protect it.

Softlayer offer a few options here:

Software Firewalls

• Microsoft Windows Firewall (free obviously)
• Advanced Policy Firewall for Linux (again free)

Hardware Firewalls

• Hardware firewall – Protects a single server, multi-tenant, port speed needs match the server speed (10, 20, 100, 200, 1000, 2000Mbps, 10Gbps but i have not seen it available), chosen when provisioning the server but can be added with a ticket to the helpdesk afterwards, inbound ruleset
• Dedicated Firewall – Single tenant, HA option, protects single VLAN, ordered separate to servers, inbound rule set.
• Fortigate Security Appliance – Protects single Public VLAN, inbound and outbound rule set, HA option, 1 Gbps firewall, ordered separate to servers, advanced features available (at a cost) such as Antivirus, IDS/IPS, Web filtering.
• Vyatta – Protects multiple VLAN in the same DC (true DMZ), inbound and outbound rule set, only firewall that can protect the private VLANs, NAT and VPN features builtin.

Turn off the internet

As Softlayer has a triple network you can just disable the Public network interface and only use the free SSL VPN to access your server, this can be safe is you have no other systems in the environment that have the Public interface enabled (I offer no guarantee and have no responsibility, I suggest you investigate this further before implementing).

Ways to connect to your server

You basically have two access points in any Softlayer server, connect over the internet on the Softlayer servers Public network interface, SSH, RDP, FTP, map network drives, etc.  You can also connect to the SSL VPN and do the same via the private network interface of the server.

Public Network

Softlayer don’t meter ingress data on the Public network, egress data is metered, although they provide 250 GB per VM and 500 GB per Bare Metal of egress bundled data a month.  So if your going to push 600 GB of data into your server over the internet a month you wont be charged, but if you pull 600 GB of data from you server over the internet you will get charged.  If you have more than 1 server in Softlayer you can pool all of your individual data together and share it between all of the servers ($25 fee per month for this).  If you have 4 Virtual servers and 2 Bare Metal server you will have 2 TB of egress Public data to use a month.

Remember this when you are doing all of your communications with your Softlayer servers via the Public (Internet) interface.

Private Network

The Private network is a private un-metered and free network that Softlayer provide with every services they sell.

The Private network is only accessible from within the Softlayer network, meaning you will need to connect to the SSL VPN then any data transfers to and from the Private interface of this un-metered.