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Getting Started

Equinix Metal™ is an automated, interconnected, low-latency bare metal-as-a-service, that is available in global locations across Platform Equinix®. We enable digital businesses to more quickly be at the center of the customers, suppliers, and partners with whom they want to connect.

Signing Up

To get started on Equinix Metal, you'll need to create an account.

Visit console.equinix.com/signup and fill in the required information. We recommend that you use a company-affiliated email address if you are creating an account that will be used professionally.

If you are looking to join an existing organization, you should have that organizations's administrator send you an invite. Otherwise, you will be asked to create an organization, which is a billable entity under which all projects and resources sit. Please note: as the organization owner you’ll need to provide a valid payment method. A temporary authorization charge of $1 USD will be placed on the card, which will be removed within 5 days.

If you want to receive Abuse and Maintenance email notifications at an address that is different from your login (such as ops@xyzplatform.com), you’ll have a chance to do that while creating the organization. You can also configure these settings at a later time.

After you sign up, use the Getting Started checklist to create a project, get all set up with SSH Keys and API Keys, and then you can move on to deploying servers.

Deploying a Server

Everything you can do on our platform, you can do via our API. However, to get familiar, we recommend creating a test machine in the portal first. Now on to spinning up your first server using the Equinix Metal console. You probably have an empty project, so on the Servers tab, click the + New Server button. You will get three deployment options, and since this is an introduction, choose On Demand.

Data Centers and Server Sizes

As you might expect, you’ll need to decide where to deploy, and also which kind of server you want to test. For getting started, we recommend the c3.small.x86 server, which costs $0.50 per hour.

Selecting an Operating System

We offer a wide variety of operating systems to choose from, including Linux distributions, Windows, and VMware ESXi (All to browse the various available options). By default our system will select the latest stable OS version, but if available, you can select an alternate version using the dropdown..

If you choose to provision using our Custom iPXE, you can specify a bootup URL, and choose to make it the default boot after provision.

Numbers, Naming, and Option Settings

If you wish, you can select to provision more than one server in a consistent configuration. Provide a hostname for your server(s) in the Hostname field, or use the auto-generated one (note: underscores are not accepted).

You also have a variety of optional or advanced settings:

Setting Description
User Data User Data allows you to specify a script or cloud config to perform various tasks after your server is ready.
Configure IPs Allows you to customize IPv4 and IPv6 settings for your server.
Customize SSH Key Access Change which keys are added to your server. By default, every users' SSH key in your organization will be added to your new server.

Once you have everything selected, review your choices, check out your cost estimate in the Summary section, and click the handy Deploy Now button!

What's Next?

Get started planning how to deploy servers that match your use-cases.