.. _insigneo_vms: Virtual Machines at the University of Sheffield =============================================== IT Services can create and run `virtual machines `__ (VMs) for researchers and typically do this at no cost to the researchers. This is currently `not a well-advertised service `__. but within INSIGNEO it is being used to provide web services around MultiSim HPC workflows (e.g. `https://ct2s.insigneo.org/ct2s/ `__). Two flavours of VM are available: * *Standard* * *Research* Reasons for using Standard VMs ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ * You want to use a long-running service (e.g. a database service or Hadoop service) rather than just work with batch jobs or interactive sessions. If the service isn't computationally demanding then a *Standard* IT Services VM should suffice. * NB *Standard* VMs are well-suited to running services as they run on highly-resilient VMWare infrastructure. * Your service(s) can run with with limited RAM and CPU cores. Reasons for using Research VMs ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ * You want to perform some computationally-intensive work with sensitive data. You may need to distribute work between many CPU cores and/or have access to several GB of RAM. IT Services-provided VMs can be certified so they comply with the `Cyber Essentials `__ scheme; this makes them suitable for working with sensitive data. It is unlikely that high-performance computing (HPC) clusters like :ref:`ShARC ` and :ref:`Iceberg ` will ever be Cyber Essentials-certified given their complexity. * You want to do some computationally-demanding work on Windows. Another option is to use one of INSIGNEO's powerful :ref:`Windows workstations `. * Note that for *Research* VMs the underlying infrastructure has less redundancy that for *Standard* VMs so *Research* VMs are less resilient and therefore *not* recommended for running long-running services.