A BigV account contains a set of groups, and each group contains a set of virtual machines. An account collects servers together for billing purposes, so you will need to create an account every time you want someone different to be paying for a set of servers.

You can use account list to show which accounts you have access to, and account select to change which account you're operating.

If you want to give out privileges to other users, you will first need to ensure they have an identity on Big by using the user new command. Once they have a user name, you can grant them privileges at one of three levels. Each level has control over everything at the next level down, as shown in this diagram:

You can also restrict privileges so that they only work under certain conditions - see the page on privilege conditions for how this works.

Account administrator

An account administrator can control all aspects of a given account's operation- they can adjust billing thresholds, create new groups and virtual machines and incur charges up to the account's credit limit.

You should only give account admin privileges to co-directors of your business, or in very small groups where you would fully trust everyone in them. Instead we generally recommend creating a group administrator (see below) over a specific group.

See account admin grant and account admin revoke for more information.

Group administrator

VMs are divided into groups; a group administrator has control over a particular group, including the ability to create and delete VMs within it.

See group admin grant and group admin revoke for more information.

VM administrator

You can grant administrative privileges just over a single virtual machine - the administrator then has the power to reboot it, change its memory allocation and access its console, which any system administrator will find useful.

See vm admin grant and vm admin revoke for more information.

VM user

A more restricted form of the VM Administrator privilege, where the granted user can only view the system's console and reboot it, NOT change the system's specifications.

See vm user grant and vm user revoke for more information.