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Glasshouse management GUI

Glasshouse is a user interface focused on streamlining administration and monitoring tasks. Create VMs quickly, update firewall rules simply, and create entire new tenancies in a few clicks.

By avoiding clutter and UI complexity, Glasshouse minimizes the time and skills required to manage your virtualization solution.

Logging in

Using your web browser of choice, navigate to the URL which points to your VM Squared installation e.g. https://<dashboard IP>/ This will open Glasshouse, the VM Squared management GUI (Graphical User Interface). Glasshouse is used administer the cluster and to create, manage, and share Virtual Machines.

Enter your login credentials into the relevant text fields.

The dashboard IP & cluster admin password are specified in the dashboard configuration step of the Installation guide.

GUI

User interface

The dashboard view will vary for each user type. If you are logging into the VM Squared dashboard as a cloud administrator user type, your dashboard will provide a concise view of the virtual objects managed by your cloud instance. From here you can instantiate new resources and check the status of already-deployed resources, as well as quickly identify issues such as failed provisioning attempts, potential resource contention, and failed hardware.

view of Glasshouse

An administrator view of the VM Squared dashboard, providing a quick overview of VM instances, users and groups, images, virtual networks and hosts, along with their resources.

Logging into the dashboard

The dashboard view can be configured for four types of user:

  • administrator,
  • groupadmin,
  • user, or
  • cloud.

These views can be customized to display the information deemed appropriate or most important for the target user type.

The administrator view exposes a complete view of the VM Squared, giving administrators and elevated users full access and control of the physical and virtual resources on the cloud. Conversely, the cloud view is a pared-down presentation that allows management of the virtual resources without the access or requirement to manage the physical resources.

Accessing the user menu

To view settings relating to the current logged-in user, find the persistent drop-down menu at the top-right hand part of the VM Squared dashboard. This is the user menu.

User Dropdown Menu

User settings and authentication

The user menu contains the links for user settings, signing out, views available to the user, and groups the user belongs to.

Click on the settings section of the user menu to view information relevant to the currently logged-in user.

Settings Menu Auth

The Info tab displays the User ID, Name, Language, View, and other related information.

The Auth tab displays the user's authentication methods for both logging into the dashboard or initiating an SSH session (required for command line interface connections). Here, the user password and their public SSH key can be altered by clicking on the pad and pen icon and then updating the fields with the new information.

Clicking the blue View button will present a salted hash value of the current password.

Danger

Never delete admin or serveradmin users. This will cause irreparable damage to the cluster and require a support ticket with SoftIron to recover the cluster.