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Overview

A new Simnet account starts empty — no region, no network, nothing running. This page walks the path from that state to a virtual machine you can reach. You don’t have to configure infrastructure up front. Simnet asks for a location the first time you create something that needs one, then sets up the private network for you.
Sign in: you’ll authenticate through your identity provider. Once signed in you land on the dashboard.

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What you’ll see on first sign-in

The dashboard renders immediately, with a banner where your resources would be:
No region configured yet Create your first resource to pick a region — we’ll set up your VPC and network automatically.
with a Get started button. Nothing is broken — the account simply has no location yet, so there is nothing to show.
Some accounts instead see a full-screen setup wizard on first sign-in, which asks whether you want to start with A single region or Multiple regions before it deploys anything. Which experience you get is decided by the platform, not by a setting you control. If you see the wizard, follow it through its Configure → Deploy → Done steps; the result is the same infrastructure described below, created up front rather than on demand. The rest of this page describes the more common on-demand path.

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Create your first virtual machine

1

Start the create flow

Click Get started on the dashboard banner, or go to Compute → Virtual Machines and start creating a VM there.
2

Pick a region

Because your account has no location yet, Simnet opens a short setup flow before the VM form. Its first step is Region: “Choose where your resources will live.”Pick the region closest to your users and continue. Simnet activates your account in that region — this creates your identity there, but no infrastructure yet.
3

Create a VPC

The second step creates your Virtual Private Cloud — the isolated private network your machines will live in.Leave it on Automatic and Simnet uses sensible defaults: name default-vpc, address range 10.0.0.0/16, and the first available zone. Switch to Manual if you need to set the VPC name, CIDR block, or zone yourself.Creating a VPC is asynchronous, so this step waits for the operation to finish before moving on.
4

Create a network

The third step adds a network inside that VPC. Again Automatic is the default: name default-network, with a gateway and IP range derived from the VPC’s address range. Manual exposes the network name, network offering, and the gateway, netmask, and start/end IP addresses.When it completes you’ll see Your environment is ready — region, VPC, and network — and a button to continue to the VM form.
5

Configure the virtual machine

Now fill in the VM itself: its name, the zone to run it in, a template or ISO to boot from, a compute offering (vCPU and memory), disk, and an SSH key if you want key-based access.
6

Launch and wait

Submit the form. The VM is created by a background job, so the list shows it progressing rather than appearing instantly. Watch Monitor → Jobs if you want the detail.
The setup flow’s length depends on what you’re creating. A VM needs a region, a VPC, and a network, so you get all three steps. Creating something that only needs a location — a volume or an SSH key, for example — asks for the region alone.

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What just got created

Your VM has a private address at this point. It is not reachable from the internet until you deliberately give it inbound access.

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Make the machine reachable

1

Get a public IP

Go to Networking → Public IPs and acquire an address in the same zone as your VM.
2

Point it at your VM

Enable Static NAT from the public IP to your virtual machine. This maps the public address one-to-one onto the machine’s private address.
3

Open the ports you need

Inbound traffic is filtered by Networking → Firewall Policies. Add rules for the ports you actually need — SSH on 22, HTTPS on 443 — rather than opening the range.
Static NAT is the only inbound service available in the current phase. Load balancing and port forwarding are both disabled, so the controls for them won’t appear on the Public IPs screen. If you need to publish several services on one address, that isn’t possible yet — use one public IP per machine.

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Next steps

Core concepts

Regions and zones, tenants and projects, and why jobs and events are separate things.

Your dashboard

Read your resource counts, quota consumption, and recent activity.

Compute

Manage the machine you just made, and add SSH keys, affinity, and autoscaling.

Networking

VPCs, public IPs, firewall policies, and connecting regions with Fabric.