Elastic Metal - Concepts

Reviewed on 12 August 2024

Elastic Metal server

Scaleway Elastic Metal are dedicated physical servers you can order on-demand, like Instances. These servers can be used for large workloads, big data and applications that require increased security and dedicated resources.

Flexible IP

Flexible IPs are additional public IP addresses that you can hold independently of any Elastic Metal server. They can be attached to and detached from any Elastic Metal server as you wish.

You can keep several flexible IP addresses in your account, and they can either be IPv4 (single IP) or IPv6 (/64 IP block) addresses.

When you delete a flexible IP address, it is disassociated from your account to be claimed by other users.

Image

An image is a file that contains the OS, application data, and any files that might be related to your applications.

If you do not know yet which image you want to run on the Elastic Metal, you can order a server without a preinstalled image.

Public IP

Public IP addresses are routed on the internet. You can enter the public IP address of your Elastic Metal server into any browser connected to the internet, and access content being served from that Elastic Metal. You can think of public IP addresses like postal addresses for buildings - they are unique, and tell the routers directing traffic through the internet where to find a particular server.

Private Networks

Private Networks allow your Elastic Metal servers to communicate with other Scaleway resources in an isolated and secure network without requiring a connection to the public internet.

Region and Availability Zone

A region is a geographical area, such as France (Paris: fr-par) or the Netherlands (Amsterdam: nl-ams), in which Scaleway products and resources are located. It can contain multiple Availability Zones.

An Availability Zone refers to the geographical location within a region, such as waw-1 (Warsaw, Poland), in which your Scaleway resource will be created. The latency between multiple AZs of the same region is low, as they have a common network layer.

For an extensive list of which regions and AZ a resource is available in, refer to our Product availability guide.

Remote access

Remote access allows you to access the keyboard, video, and mouse of the machine remotely by using KVM over IP device. It enables you access to the machine even if the installed OS is not working properly, to debug the system, or to install your own OS from a remote ISO file.

Remote access is available as an option on most Elastic Metal offers. Currently, remote access must be configured via the API.

Rescue Mode

Rescue mode restarts your server via the network on a minimal operating system. You can use it to debug a server and recover system data.

Your server must be powered on and running to switch to rescue mode, which creates a ramdisk with the content of a downloaded rootfs.

After disabling rescue mode, you have to reboot your server.