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2026-10-21

Switch Cloud Compute: Second Region ZHC

Switch Cloud Compute is now available in a second region, ZHC (Zurich Central). This marks a significant expansion of the Switch Cloud Compute infrastructure, giving customers the flexibility to deploy workloads across two geographically separated locations within Switzerland.

Two regions, one platform

Switch Cloud Compute is now available in two regions:

Regions diagram

You can choose which region to deploy your workloads in based on your requirements.

What is available in ZHC

The same compute services available in ZHW are now available in ZHC:

  • Instances: Easily create and manage virtual machines tailored to your specific needs, enabling rapid deployment and scaling of applications.
  • Images: Maintain and deploy standardized templates for your virtual machines, ensuring consistency and efficiency across your infrastructure. You can also upload your own images.
  • Volumes: Allocate and manage block storage volumes to suit your data requirements, providing persistent storage for your applications.
  • Volume Snapshots: Create point-in-time snapshots of your volumes for backup and disaster recovery purposes, ensuring your data is always protected.
  • Networks: Define and manage your virtual networks, ensuring optimal communication between your instances and other network resources.
  • Network Load Balancer: a component in cloud environments like OpenStack, ensuring the efficient distribution of incoming network traffic across multiple servers or instances.
  • Routers: Configure and control routing between different networks, enhancing the connectivity and security of your infrastructure.
  • Security Groups: Implement fine-grained security controls by defining rules that manage incoming and outgoing traffic for your instances.
  • Floating IPs: Assign public IPv4 addresses to your instances, or move an existing one between instances, allowing them to be accessible from the internet while maintaining control over network traffic.

Seamless management with Horizon Dashboard

Our Compute service is designed to be user-friendly and accessible through the Horizon Dashboard, OpenStack's powerful web-based interface. This intuitive platform allows you to:

  • Easily navigate and manage aspects of your cloud infrastructure.
  • Quickly deploy, configure, and scale your virtual machines, storage, and networking resources.

Use cases

Distributing and managing your workloads across these regions is your responsibility.

Common use cases include:

  • High availability - distribute your applications across two locations to reduce the risk of downtime
  • Geographic redundancy - keep your data and services across two separate Swiss locations
  • Workload separation - run different environments or applications in different regions based on your needs

Getting started

When working in the Horizon Dashboard, you can switch between regions using the dropdown menu in the top navigation bar. The dropdown menu shows your current domain, project and active region.

To select a region:

  1. Log in to Horizon Dashboard from Switch Cloud Portal
  2. Click the dropdown menu in the top navigation bar showing your current project and region
  3. Under Regions, select either zhw or zhc
  4. The dashboard will reload and show resources belonging to the selected region

Region selector

Note: Switching regions will show only the compute resources deployed in the selected region. Organisation-wide resources such as users, projects and domains are shared across both regions. Quotas for ZHC are set to default values for all existing projects.

For questions or support, contact the Switch Cloud Support team at cloud-support@switch.ch