1. Go to your Controller dashboard and click on the Instances tab:

    your instances view

  2. Click on Create Instance(s), and the Create New Instances view displays:

    new instances view

  3. Select the VM Template and click Start. The Create New Instances view closes and returns you to the Instances view. You should now see the Instance in a Scheduling or Pulling State: a scheduling instance

  4. After the Scheduling and Pulling finishes, the VM starts on one of the Nodes and shows a Started State in the Controller UI:

    a started instance

You can now confirm the Instance is running from inside the Node:

  • JSON output is available for scripting/automation using anka --machine-readable
sudo anka --machine-readable list | jq
{
  "status": "OK",
  "body": [
    {
      "status": "suspended",
      "name": "catalina",
      "stop_date": "2020-04-01T21:30:59.798697Z",
      "creation_date": "2020-04-01T00:00:13.656296Z",
      "version": "base",
      "uuid": "10c720eb-dcce-46f7-baa3-28bacef0ec0f"
    },
    {
      "status": "running",
      "name": "mgmtManaged-catalina-1585776660490226000",
      "stop_date": "2020-04-01T21:36:11.742662Z",
      "creation_date": "2020-04-01T21:31:01.055250Z",
      "version": "",
      "uuid": "dcbeb319-421a-4d30-8466-194eb7fa5f75"
    }
  ],
  "message": ""
}
Timestamp format: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3339.txt