Evaluating Gallium Edge on Digital Ocean
If you want to try Gallium Edge before committing physical hardware, you can run it on a Digital Ocean droplet. Digital Ocean supports importing a custom disk image and booting a droplet from it, which lets you stand up an evaluation hypervisor in minutes and explore the Console at minimal cost.
This path is for evaluation only. Gallium runs here under nested virtualization, a hypervisor inside a cloud virtual machine, which is not supported for production workloads. Use it to learn the product and try out the interface, not to run anything you depend on.
Import a Custom Image
In the Digital Ocean control panel, open Images from the sidebar, switch to the Custom Images tab, and click Import from URL. Digital Ocean will fetch the Gallium disk image directly rather than requiring you to upload a file from your own machine.
Upload the Image
You need the Gallium image URL to complete the import. This URL is shown on the Add Hypervisor page in the Gallium Console, where the boot image is offered as a download. Copy that link and paste it into the Import from URL field in Digital Ocean.
Then set the remaining fields:
- Choose Unknown as the distribution. Gallium is not one of the Linux distributions Digital Ocean lists.
- Select the region or regions where you want the image to be available.
- Click Upload Image.
Digital Ocean will download and process the image. This usually takes around ten minutes, after which the image shows as available in your Custom Images list.
Start a Droplet
Once processing completes, find the image in the Custom Images list, open the More dropdown next to it, and choose Start a droplet. This launches the droplet creation flow with your Gallium image already selected as the boot disk.
Choose an Instance Type
On the droplet creation page, choose an Intel instance type with at least 4 GB of RAM. Gallium needs the extra memory to run its own services alongside any test virtual machine you create.
Use an Intel instance. Nested virtualization has been observed to be unstable on Digital Ocean's AMD instances, which can cause the evaluation hypervisor or its guest VMs to behave unpredictably. Intel instances avoid this.
Configure Authentication
Digital Ocean requires you to select an SSH key or set a root password before it will create the droplet. Provide one to satisfy the form, but be aware that Gallium ignores these credentials. The Gallium image manages its own access and does not use Digital Ocean's SSH keys or passwords. When you are ready, click Create Droplet.
Retrieve the Join Code
The droplet takes a few minutes to boot the first time. Once it is running, open its console from the Digital Ocean control panel. Gallium prints a nine-character Join Code on screen once it has finished starting up.
Enter that Join Code in the Console to register the droplet as a hypervisor against your account. From there, adopting and setting up the evaluation hypervisor follows the same path as a physical install. See Installing Gallium Edge for the registration and first-run steps.
The evaluation hypervisor behaves like any other Gallium Edge server. Before you can create virtual machines on it, you still need to create its Storage Pool as the first setup task.