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What Simnet is

Simnet is a cloud platform for running virtual machines and their supporting storage and networking, across multiple geographic regions. You work in a web console; everything the console does is also reachable over an authenticated REST API. The platform is built on Apache CloudStack, which is why some screens and status values use CloudStack’s vocabulary — you’ll see “instances” alongside “virtual machines”, and the dashboard describes itself as showing “CloudStack resource allocation and activity”.

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What you can create

Monitoring (events and jobs), organization management (users, tenants, audit log), and settings sit alongside these as supporting surfaces rather than resources you create.

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How the console is organized

The left sidebar is the primary navigation. It groups screens the same way this documentation does:

Dashboard

Infrastructure Overview — counts, quotas, allocation, and recent activity.

Compute

The machines themselves and the things that shape how they run.

Storage

Disks, point-in-time copies, shared file storage, and backups.

Networking

Private networks, inbound access, and cross-region connectivity.

Images

What a new machine boots from.

Monitor

Events and jobs.

Organization

Users, tenants, audit log.

Settings

Account preferences and projects.
Help & Support and Settings sit at the bottom of the sidebar, separated from the resource areas.
The sidebar adapts to your account. Screens that are still in development, that your account isn’t entitled to, or that your plan doesn’t include are hidden rather than shown disabled — so your sidebar may have fewer entries than the list above. See what’s not yet available.

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Where things live

Two ideas govern almost every screen:
  • Location. Every resource belongs to an availability zone inside a region. Screens that create resources ask you where, and lists are scoped to the region context you’re currently in.
  • Ownership. Resources belong to a tenant, and optionally to a project inside it. A context switcher in the top bar controls which tenant you’re acting as.
Both are covered in Core concepts.

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Asynchronous by default

Creating a VM, attaching a volume, or building a VPC does not finish while you wait. Simnet submits the operation and returns immediately; a background job carries it to completion, and the console reflects the new state when the job finishes. This is why you’ll see progress indicators and “creating” states rather than instant results, and why the Jobs screen exists.
If an action seems not to have taken effect, check Monitor → Jobs before retrying. A job that is still Running will complete on its own, and retrying can create a duplicate resource.

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Features still in development

Simnet ships incrementally, and unfinished surfaces are hidden rather than shown broken. The following are known not to be generally available: Individual screens also have specific controls that aren’t wired up yet. Each area’s overview page calls these out where they exist, and they are labelled “not yet available” rather than described as if they work.