TIR Virtual Machine

A TIR Virtual Machine (VM) is a full operating system with its own Linux kernel and root access. Use it for work that needs changes to the operating system or kernel modules. You sign in over SSH with your own key. A VM runs on a GPU plan, a CPU plan, or your own TIR private cluster. It has one disk, which keeps your files when the VM stops, starts, or restarts.

Choose a VM when you want a whole machine to sign in to as root and set up your own way. Choose a TIR Instance when a container started from a ready-made image, often with an app such as JupyterLab, already has what you need.

Where to find it

In TIR, open your project. In the side menu, under Compute, select Virtual Machines. Your VMs are listed in Manage VMs, and Create VM starts a new one.

What you can do

Start with Get started with TIR Virtual Machines, which launches a CPU VM and signs in to it over SSH.

Create and connect

• Create a VM on a GPU, CPU, or private cluster plan, one or several at once.
• Connect to a VM over SSH as root.
• Manage SSH keys on a VM: add, replace, or remove keys while the VM keeps running.
• Add startup scripts to a VM that set it up each time it boots.

Power and lifecycle

• Stop, start, and restart a VM.
• Retry a failed VM launch.
• Change the plan of a VM to give it more or fewer GPUs, vCPUs, or memory.
• Clone a VM to launch a new VM with the same settings.
• Delete a VM when you have finished with it.

Pay for a fixed term

• Convert a VM to a committed plan to pay for a fixed term upfront at a lower price. Billing options for TIR Virtual Machines compares hourly and committed billing.

Data

• Resize the disk of a VM when it fills up.
• Mount datasets and file systems on a VM to work on data that lives outside the VM’s disk.

Network

• Attach a reserved IP to a VM to give it an address that stays yours.
• Attach a VPC to a VM to give a CPU VM a private address in your own network.
• Attach security groups to a VM to decide which traffic reaches it, and to open a port for an app.

Protect

• Create a VM snapshot to keep a copy of the disk, then restore the VM from it or create a new VM from it. Snapshots have their own section, TIR Snapshots.

Monitor

• Monitor a VM: its CPU, memory, disk, network, and GPU charts.
• Set up alerts for a VM to hear when a figure crosses a limit.

To run several identical VMs that grow and shrink with demand or on a schedule, see TIR Auto Scaling Groups. A group starts from a snapshot of one of your VMs.

You can also create, start, stop, and delete VMs through the compute operations in the TIR API.

For help with a message, see Troubleshooting TIR Virtual Machines, and for short answers, the TIR Virtual Machine FAQ.