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Your First Virtual Machine

Now that you can log in to OpenStack Horizon, it's time to launch your first virtual machine. This page is a short overview — each step links to the detailed instructions in the OpenStack documentation.

Prerequisites

  • You can sign in to OpenStack Horizon (see First Login).
  • You have a project selected at the top left.
  • You know which region and availability zone you want to deploy into (see Core Concepts).

The path in six steps

  1. Create an SSH Key Pair — Horizon generates a key pair; the private key downloads automatically. You'll need it to log in to the VM later.

    Create SSH Key Pair

  2. Create a Security Group with an SSH rule — a Security Group is the software firewall in front of your VM. At minimum, allow inbound TCP port 22 (SSH) from your IP range.

    Setup Security Group

  3. Create a Router and a private network — the router links your private network to the public external network so your VM can reach the internet.

    Setup Network Topology

  4. Launch the Instance — pick an image (e.g. Ubuntu 24.04), a flavor (vCPU/RAM), your network, key pair, and security group. Zero-Disk flavors (g*) are recommended — they boot from a persistent volume that you can resize later.

    Launch Instance Wizard

  5. Associate a Floating IP — a Floating IP is a public, routable address you attach to the VM so it becomes reachable from the internet.

    Associate Floating IP

  6. SSH into the VM — connect with the private key from step 1:

    ssh -i <your-private-key> ubuntu@<floating-ip>

    For Windows / PuTTY users, the .pem key must first be converted to .ppk format.

    Access a Linux VM from PuTTY

Boot from volume

The wizard's Create New Volume: Yes option creates a persistent root volume. This lets you resize the root disk later and keep the data when the instance is deleted — recommended. See Volume Operations for attaching, formatting, and mounting additional volumes.

Quick path: CLI

Prefer the command line? Once you have the OpenStack CLI configured, a single openstack server create command replaces steps 1-5. See Automation & IaC for the full example.

Next step

You have a running VM. Now store some data — create your first S3 bucket.