IP Address Types
Public IP addresses
A public IP address allows a Virtual Machine to connect directly to the Internet, ie without the intermediary of another device.Cloud-Bricks provides free public IPv6 addresses for all your virtual machines.
The IPv4 addresses prices have been increased frequently in recent years and therefore they are available at an additional cost.
(For more information please contact support).
However the Cloud-Bricks system has been constructed to minimize the need for public IPv4 addresses and facilitate the transition to the new IPv6 Internet.
Cloud-Bricks can perform all the following tasks through IPv4 connections without having public IPv4 addresses assigned to virtual machines.
- Display the virtual machine console through a browser (VNC).
- Managing a virtual machine using SSH or Remote Desktop.
- Publish Web Sites.
- Publish Secured web sites (HTTPS)
- Creating public email servers
- Creating public FTP servers
- Expose TCP or UDP
Ports directly on the Internet.
All these tasks are possible thanks to our IPv4 NAT Addresses:
IPv4 NAT
NAT is a service that enables communication between networks (public networks to private ones, usually) by translating addresses within the IP protocol packets.
Cloud-Bricks uses the NAT mechanism to provide IPv4
connectivity to virtual machines without public IPv4 addresses.
By assigning an IPv4 NAT address to a virtual machine, it will
not be directly exposed on the Internet, that is a huge security
advantage!
With an IPv4 NAT address a virtual machine can connect to any
Internet service available through IPv4.
The virtual machine can be managed (SSH or RDP) via IPv4, can be
used as a Web, Mail or FTP server and
it can even expose services in the Internet through the port forwarding
mechanism.
IPv4 NAT Addresses in the Cloud-Bricks network are assigned
within the 169.254.0.0/16 range.
All this is possible because each Cloud-Brick Node has a public
IPv4 address. This Public IP is shared with all virtual machines
allowing them to have the connectivity options described above.
As you can see for the most common server scenarios there is no
need to assign Public IPv4 Addresses to your Virtual Machines.
However they are available if you really need them.
If you have any doubts please contact our support
team.
Private IP addresses
They are used to identify virtual machines within an isolated
private network.
The concept of VLAN is used to create
private networks of virtual machines so they can share data
between them safely without the risk of data being read or
intercepted by other virtual machines that do not belong to the
same VLAN.
When you assign a private IP address to a virtual machine, you
are making it part of a VLAN.
Private VLAN IP addresses within Cloud-Bricks belong to the
10.x.x.x (IPv4) or fd00 :: (IPv6) networks.
A virtual machine can operate only with a private IP and still be able to serve as Web, Mail or FTP server, and can even be managed remotely through a VPN connection (This would be a high security scenario). However it will not be able to access any service on the Internet. For that purpose it would be necessary to assign a Public or NAT IP address.