Manage public IPs from a VM

_{Updated May 8, 2026} The Network tab on a VM’s detail page is the per-VM control panel for that VM’s public IPs and VPC connections. Most operations you can do from the account-wide Public IPs tab in Networking, you can also do here — and this is the right place when you’re focused on one VM rather than the whole account.

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Open the Network tab

From Compute, click into a VM. The detail page has a row of tabs across the top — Graphs / Activity / Actions / Network / Snapshots / Backups / Power / Resize / Destroy. Click Network. The page is split into two zones — Public Networking at the top and Private Networking below.

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Public Networking — IPv4 and IPv6

This section shows up to one IPv4 card and up to one IPv6 card from the dashboard. (More than that requires support — see Multiple IPs per VM below.)

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IPv4 card — what’s on it

When the VM has a public IPv4, the card shows the full picture: Two action buttons at the bottom:

• Attach (next to Firewall) — opens the firewall picker. Select an existing firewall to apply its rules to this IP. The same IP can have one firewall attached.
• Remove Public IP (red) — detaches this IP from the VM. For an auto-assigned IP, the address goes back to the regional pool. For a reserved IP, the IP stays in your account, just unattached. The dialog confirms which type before you proceed.

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Add a public IP

If the VM doesn’t currently have a public IP of a given type, you’ll see an Add Public IPv4 / IPv6 Address button instead of the card. Click it; a small dialog opens letting you pick: The IPv6 section in the screenshot shows the empty state — “Enable dual-stack networking with a public IPv6 address” with an Add IPv6 Address button. Click to add an IPv6 the same way.

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Remove a public IP

Click Remove Public IP on the IP card. A confirmation dialog explains what happens next based on the IP’s type: The VM stays running. If you remove its only public IP, the VM is reachable only over its VPC connections after the remove. Active SSH/RDP sessions on the removed IP are dropped.

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Private Networking — VPC connections

Below Public Networking, the Private Networking section shows the VM’s VPC interfaces. A VM can hold one public interface (eth0) and any number of VPC interfaces (eth1, eth2, …). Each VPC card has its own Detach action — the equivalent of detaching from a VPC’s VMs tab.

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Multiple IPs per VM

The dashboard supports at most one IPv4 and one IPv6 per VM. If your workload needs more (multi-homed services, anycast-ish setups, IP-based virtual hosting where SNI isn’t an option), contact support — they can attach additional IPs at $3/month per extra IPv4 or $1/month per extra IPv6, billed the same way as a reserved IP. This is rare; most workloads use a single public IP plus a reverse proxy / SNI, or attach a Firewall Appliance to the VPC and run multiple services behind it. Reach for multiple IPs only when you’ve ruled those out.

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