Bluemix: Cannot create VM with public IP

Question

When I try to create a VM with a public IP address on Bluemix, I get the following error:

Your VMs are in error - Resource CREATE failed: Error: Resource CREATE failed: Error: Resource CREATE failed: NotFound: External network f242da31-3809-48a4-aa84-46da1c50586c is not reachable from subnet a78fbf7e-1e4a-4d3a-a039-c05be4846bc3. Therefore, cannot associate Port 6978

Creating a VM without a public IP works, but I cannot connect to the VM without a public IP.

I also tried creating a network on the Horizon dashboard, but I could not figure out how to assign a public IPv4 or IPv6 address. I understand that IPv4 addresses may be short in supply and would be happy with an "IPv6 only" VM, but I could not figure out how to request a "public" IPv6 prefix on Bluemix.

Answer 1

I have not seen that error. I think the problem you ran into may be intermittent. I just created a VM an hour ago using the Bluemix dashboard and that worked no problem. As usual, the VM was assigned two IP's, one internal and one public.

As you've discovered, in the Horizon dashboard, when you create a VM, by default it only has an internal IP. To add a public IP takes a few steps that aren't exactly obvious:

• From the Cloud Management Dashboard, select the Instances tab
• In the Actions column for your VM, select Associate Floating IP
• In the IP Address field, select an IP address
  • By default, there won't be any IP addresses to select. To allocate one, press the plus (+) sign.
  • In the Allocate Floating IP dialog, set the Pool to Public-Network and press Allocate IP.
• Now select that IP address you've just allocated.
• For Port to be associated, choose the internal IP and press Associate.

Now the Instances tab will display the VM with two IP addresses.

If this doesn't work: There is a limit to how many public IPs you get, so maybe you've hit that limit. Looks like Horizon shows the limit as 10; I think that's public, but it may be public and private.

To see the list of IPs allocated to your account (and whether that list has reached 10):

• From the Cloud Management Dashboard, go to the Access & Security tab.
• Go to the Floating IPs sub-tab.

That shows your list of public IPs and their mapping to internal IPs. If you've reached you max, you'll need to move an IP from one VM to another. You can delete the first VM to make its IP available. Or you can disassociate the IP from one VM (don't release the IP, disassociate it) and then assign it to another VM has described above.

This screen is another place to allocate IPs to your account. The only network I see is Public-Network, and it has IPv4 addresses. I don't see any way to allocate IPv6 addresses.