Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI)

Virtual Machine Infrastructure based on CloudStack

Research Computing Services offers Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) to allow users to quickly spin up Linux or other Non-Windows based virtual machines (VMs) for research purposes. This service is intended to provide University of Calgary researchers access to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to enable quick prototyping and research related software testing on premises. There is no cost associated with the use of this service for all researchers at the University of Calgary.

Researchers may use this service to: 

  • Create and manage non-Windows based virtual machines for Level 1 and Level 2 data 
  • Manage VMs via the CloudStack management dashboard and API 
  • Allow external (internet) access to VMs through an external IP to their VM network
  • Allow additional users access to manage their VMs

Please refer to our CloudStack End User Agreement for acceptable uses and requirements.

For use-cases that require virtual machines running Microsoft Windows operating systems, please contact us.

Virtual Machine Limitations

All DRI-based virtual machines are suitable for workloads that fit within the following virtual machine specifications:

  • Maximum virtual machine size:
    • 8 virtual CPUs
    • 32 GB memory
    • 1 TB block storage
  • All data stored on the virtual machine meets the University of Calgary's Information Security Classification Standard level 1 or level 2.
  • Users must backup their data to their own infrastructure. There is no backup or uptime guarantees with this service.

Request for a CloudStack Account

Principal Investigators and Research Team Members can use the Apache CloudStack catalog item in ServiceNow to request the creation of a CloudStack account. Allow 3 business days for your request to be processed.

When completing the form, select the following options:

  1. “What would you like to do?” – Create new CloudStack account
  2. Fill out the rest of the form

You can also use this catalog item to:

  • Create new CloudStack account
  • Add a user to an existing CloudStack account
  • Add an external IP address to my CloudStack network
  • Remove a user from an existing CloudStack account
  • Remove an external IP address from my CloudStack network
  • Remove an existing CloudStack account

CloudStack Training

Please refer to our CloudStack User Guide to familiarise yourself with the use of CloudStack. If you have any additional questions with CloudStack, please contact RCS.

CloudStack User Guide