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Start a Windows Instance

Switch Cloud Compute provides the possibility of starting a Windows Server 2022 or a Windows Server 2025 instance. These instances include a valid license: activating your Windows copy you will get software updates.

Prerequisites

Before you launch your instance there are some prerequisites that have to be met:

Launch a Windows instance in Horizon Dashboard

Navigate to Project > Compute > Instances and click Launch Instance. The Launch Instance popup window will appear where you will find tabs and fields for configuring the settings of the newly created instance.

Details

In this tab you can configure the fundamental settings for your new virtual machine (VM).

  • Project Name: This field is set with the name of your project and cannot be changed.
  • Instance Name: Enter the name of your instance.
  • Description: Provide a description of your instance.
  • Availability Zone: Set to NOVA (you cannot change this field).
  • Count: Specify the number of instances you want to launch. Keep in mind that the maximum number of instances you can launch on behalf of one project is limited by the project (virtual) cores and instances quota.

Once you've filled out the mandatory fields marked with the * in the Details tab, you can proceed to the next configuration step by clicking Next at the bottom of the form or by selecting Source tab from the left panel of the popup screen.

Source

In this tab you specify the source for the operating system volume of your new virtual machine.

  • Select Boot Source:

Choose Image as the boot source. Then select one of the Windows server images present in the Available list.

Volume Size: After selecting desired image you will be able to set the Volume Size in GBs for the new volume. The minimum volume size for a Windows image is 50 GB, and the maximum size is set by your quotas.

Delete Volume on Instance Delete:

  • No: the default value – the root volume is kept, and not deleted, even after the instance is deleted.
  • Yes: the root volume is deleted when the instance is deleted. Please only set it to Yes when you understand the consequences.

Flavor

Select the flavor that meets your instance vCPUs and RAM requirements.

Please ignore the 0 values in Total Disk, Root Disk, Ephemeral Disk columns. Disk is not used in our OpenStack.

There is no difference in flavors between Linux and Windows images: both can run using any of the General-Purpose, Memory-Optimized or Compute-Optimized Flavors.

Networks

In this tab, you should choose one of your previously created private networks. If you haven't created a private network yet, please refer to Create Private Networks and create one before launching a new instance.

Security Group

The default security group is automatically assigned to the new instance. In this security group, besides other instances that are also assigned to this security group, all incoming traffic is blocked.

If you want to allow any traffic to your instance, it is recommended to create your own security group with specific rules. In windows there is no SSH by default: to administer your instance remotely it is common practice to use Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Remote Desktop allows remote connections to computers running Windows or Windows Server over RDP, listening on TCP port 3389 by default. You can also create an "RDP" security group and associate it to your instance at a later time.

If you don't know how to create your own security group, please read Create and Manage Security Groups.

Key Pair

Since Windows is not using SSH by default, there is no point in setting an SSH key pair, as it will not be used anyways. There are no downsides in setting an SSH key however.

After completing all the steps described above, you can click Launch Instance in the bottom right corner of the popup.

Congratulations! You have launched your new Windows instance in Switch Cloud Compute.

After launch configuration

  • Connect to your running Windows instance using RDP or console tab of the Dashboard (instance -> specific instance info -> console tab)
  • At first login attempt, you will be forced to set password for the default Administrator, named cloudadmin. This is the only active account by default.
  • Register your Windows copy using the pre-set license key and get software updates.

For details and examples on how to do this via CLI please take a look at the Launch a Linux-based instance using the CLI section of the start a linux based instance article