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 ShARC and 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 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.