The Nectar Research Cloud dashboard is the first and easiest way to manage your Virtual Machine (VM's) in the Nectar cloud. You will find a guide to the dashboard below. You can find the Nectar dashboard at https://dashboard.rc.nectar.org.au, where you'll be asked to log in with your AAF credentials.

Overview

The first screen you'll see when you log on to the dashboard is the Overview screen. It has a familiar navigation panel on the left hand side and a central space that shows your dashboard information. On the overview screen this information consists of pie charts indicating the resource usage (e.g. number VCPUs in use) in your allocation. An important part of your dashboard is the Project Selector on the top left hand side: if you manage more than one project on the Nectar cloud this selector will determine which project your dashboard information relates to.

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Instances

You reach the instances screen in the dashboard by clicking the Instances tab in the navigation panel. The central space now shows information about the instances in your project, including their Name, IP Address and other info.

Beside a filter function at the top of the table (which can be handy if your project contains many instances), there are some command buttons (e.g. Launch Instance). You can find detailed information for each instance by clicking the Instance Name and you can perform a number of administrative Actions on each VM by making a selection from the instance's corresponding Action Menu Button.

You can find similar information screens for information about your Volumes, Images and Access & Security using the navigation panel.

Allocations

From the left panel, you can use the Allocations screens for managing allocation requests. Start a new allocation request using the New Request tab, and find information about any existing request you have on the My Requests screen. You can also use the My Requests screen to request amendments to any of your allocations, should you need additional resources.

Other features

All basic features for managing your Nectar OpenStack VMs, including Orchestrating a stack of them, and various Storage options are in the Nectar Dashboard. Additional features can be accessed using Command Line Interface or one of the OpenStack APIs.