What's new in the ITS Private Cloud? (2024-09)

We are excited to announce the following features and improvements to the ITS Private Cloud and Billing services - all designed to enhance your experience and streamline your computing needs:

Announcements

ITS Private Cloud CLI Demo (vsscli-demo.eis) now running on FreeBSD 14 and Python 3.11

We are thrilled to announce that our vsscli-demo.eis.utoronto.ca server has undergone a significant upgrade, bringing with it a host of exciting new features and improvements. As of today, our server is now running on the latest version of FreeBSD 14, along with Python 3.11. Read on ITS Private Cloud CLI Demo (vsscli-demo.eis) now running on FreeBSD 14 and Python 3.11 .

Artificial Intelligence

The ITS Private Cloud AI powered Assistant has a new look

Available at ITS Private Cloud Assistant , the assistant now relies on on-premises knowledge powered by our EISgpt suite of AI assistants.

Deploy Tabby for AI powered Code Assistants on the ITS Private Cloud

Tabby is an open-source, self-hosted AI coding assistant that offers an alternative to GitHub Copilot. It is designed to help developers write code more efficiently and effectively. As a self-hosted alternative, Tabby allows developers to integrate it into their hardware and have complete control over their data and privacy.How-to deploy Tabby for AI powered Code Assistants on the ITS Private Cloud

Billing Portal

Main Dashboard improvements

The ITS Private Cloud Annual Cost Trend was refactored to enhance its usability and provide a more intuitive user experience.

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Backup Usage Monthly Usage Dashboard

This interface enables you to drill down into the backup data for each Host, virtual or physical, in order to see the trend data for each billing period (month). Just go to the Billing Portal (https://utor.cloud/billing-portal), click on the UTORrecover menu and select the client associated to the Host and a chart should show up as follows:

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ITS Private Cloud Portal

Requesters can now view all group requests in the History section

This enables seamless cross-referencing between team-submitted requests for easier collaboration and tracking.

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Command Line Interface

v2024.8.1

Default --action set to up on vss-cli compute vm set client-note command.

Core libraries updates.

v2024.9.0

Requesters can now view all group requests when executing vss-cli request {request-type} ls commands.

This enables seamless cross-referencing between team-submitted requests for easier collaboration and tracking.

assist command add note to always check for references:

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How-to articles

How to use Virtual Machine Retirement Requests with the vss-cli

Virtual Machine Retirement Requests provide a workflow to manage the retirement and deletion of virtual machines, along with automated messages before the retirement date. How-to use Virtual Machine Retirement Requests with the ITS Command Line Interface vss-cli

How to generate a cost estimate of virtual machines and other EIS services

The virtual machine calculator provided by the ITS Private Cloud is a useful tool for estimating the costs of virtual machines. In this guide, we will walk you through the process of using the calculator to generate a cost estimate.How-to generate a cost estimate of virtual machines

How to use the --columns option in the vss-cli

One of the most powerful options in the ITS Private Cloud Command-Line interface (vss-cli) is the --columns global option. This option allows to show/hide any object attribute to customize the output of the vss-cli.How-to use the --columns option in the vss-cli?