I have a compute engine instance on google cloud which is running fine. user base is increasing and I wish to upgrade to a bigger compute engine in terms of cpu and memory.
What is the most easy way to do such migration?
What is the snapshot, image, persistent disk features in google compute engine? Are they anyway useful to my task?
I figured it out. Lennert answer is good. I will add few more things to complete it. You can always stop a VM, edit the CPU/memory and restart the VM. But this action may change the external IP address and cause lot of issues. You can handle it but it may cause further downtime. You may have to update the new IP address at DNS and inside the code. One way to avoid this hassle is that you should Reserve a static IP adreess [in console, go to NETWORKING > EXTERNAL IP ADDRESS > RESERVE A STATIC IP ADDRESS]. If you do this, your ip address will not change once you restart the VM.
Image is aka Operating System. While creating a VM, you are asked to choose a boot disk, disk which is used to boot your VM from. You can select from pre-defined images.
Snapshot is the copy of the disk. If it is a boot disk, it contains the operating system image too. We can create a snapshot of an existing disk and use it as the boot disk while creating new VM.
Persistent Disk is the disk that can persists even if you delete the VM [provided you have deselect the option of deleting it while deleting the VM]. We can delete VM and use a persistent disk to create new ones. We can simply pay for persistent disk only, without having any VM.
The easiest way is to stop the machine, change the machine type from the console and start the machine again. No need to create backups (snapshots), new VM's, etc.
Related
I am now to GCE and now looking for a way to backup our GCE VM.
As per Google documentation, it seems that Google recommends performing the VM backup by creating snapshots. However, in VMware, using snapshots as a backup method is not recommended as the delta disk will grow and the system may be unstable.
I wonder if the way GCE handle snapshot different with Vmware so in GCE, snapshots can be used as a backup method?
Thanks
Yes, you can use snapshots as backup. You can take backup of a persistent disk by creating snapshots even while they are attached to running instances. Snapshots are global resources, so you can use them to restore data to a new disk or instance within the same project. You can also share snapshots across projects.
You can refer to the public documentation of GCP on persistent disk snapshots: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/create-snapshots
In GCP you can use the instance templates to create VMs and you can use it as backup for creating VMs when you need.Instance templates define the machine type, boot disk image or container image, labels, and other instance properties. You can then use an instance template to create a MIG or to create individual VMs. Instance templates are a convenient way to save a VM instance's configuration so you can use it later to create VMs or groups of VMs.
You can refer to the public documentation of GCP on Instance templates : https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instance-templates
Note on backups and persistent disk snapshots
"If you create a snapshot of your persistent disk while your application is running, the snapshot might not capture pending writes that are in transit from memory to disk." -- Best practices for persistent disk snapshots. This could lead to snapshots which aren't actually a good backup, because the disk is in an unexpected state. The linked doc gives recommendations on pausing applications before snapshotting to ensure consistent backups.
Another option (for applications which support it), is to do application level backups using their tools. Databases, for example, usually have their own tooling for backups which understand application state and create reliable backups.
Are GCE persistent disk snapshots different than VMWare snapshots?
Yes, they are different. GCE PD doesn't stack deltas of the changes over time. The two systems use the word snapshot, but the underlying mechanism is different.
In VMWare, if you take multiple snapshots, each snapshot freezes the current disk state and future snapshots are based on the differences (deltas) from the previous ones, creating a chain of differences and the disk is the most recent state. A snapshot is a point in time of the evolution of the disk data. This allows directly rolling back the disk, but if you store a nightly snapshot as a backup, you can't just delete the old snapshots because new ones rely on the old ones. (There are options to compact them, though)
In Compute Engine, snapshots are separate objects and each snapshot is based on the state of the original disk at that time. A snapshot is a logical copy of the disk at a certain time. If you take nightly backups, you can delete old ones because they are independent from each other.
Also, Compute Engine snapshots are only snapshots of the disk, not the machine configuration. Machine Images capture both machine configuration and the disk state.
I'm trying to set up a Staging VM for a site that's in production that I have just inherited. The site is running Wordpress/Woocommerce and has not been updated in a while. The VM it's hosted on is running an old version of PHP. Obviously, this all needs to be fixed up but I'm unfamiliar with GCP Compute Engine. Also any attempt to run backup/clone plugins crashes the site and requires a restore from the daily snapshot which is very annoying.
Is it possible to clone the VM/disk to a new instance, point that at a temporary domain, and test/update the site? I have been trying to do this for a while now without much luck any suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Creating a clone of an existing VM is possible and quite easy.
Create a snapshot of the VM. If possible stop the VM before doing this to ensure 100% accuracy - this way you will have exact snapshot of the drive without any errors. You can do it while the VM is running too if stopping it is out of the question.
Create a VM from the shapshot - select as a boot disk a snapshot that you've just created. Remember to assign a static public IP to this VM (unless you want it changed after VM restart and since you're going to do some configuration this would likely happen). You can change the VM's specs at this time too - nothing stops you from adding/removing CPU's, RAM etc. It may well be that your VM is underutilised and you can use something smaller to save costs. Or the opposite.
Start the machine. Now you can modify your WP configuration to point to a new domain. Depending on the SSL certificate - you can either use external one or the one provided by GCP (most convinient solution).
If you already own a domain you want to use for staging you can host it in Cloud DNS or at some other provider - just point it to the external IP you just reserved.
If you will be hosting your domain in the Cloud DNS then you will find necessary infomration in the documentation about managed zones (domains).
You can also consider creating a new VM and setting it as a template for creating a group of VM's (managed autoscaled group) and creating an external HTTPS load balancer in front of it. But this adds a little to the complexity so it's just my idea if you needed to handle a lot more traffic.
I have an EC2 Instance running Windows Server 2012. My server is running a MySQL database, a wordpress website, and a Web Service, all in IIS. I installed these manually and configured them myself if that's important.
I looked into methods for backing up, and came across EBS Snapshots (Elastic Block Store > Snapshots > Create Snapshot), and Images (Instances > Actions > Image > Create Image). From my understanding, an EBS Snapshot is a snapshot (backup) of any attached EBS volumes (in my case the root drive C). An Image is an image of the entire instance. Am I correct so far in my descriptions of the two methods?
I want to have a backup of my server as described above (database, wordpress, web service, iis settings). Would am EBS Snapshot suffice for this? i.e, if my instance or ebs volume fails one day, by recreating an instance and attaching the EBS snapshot to the new instance, will my server be configured the same as the failed instance (database, wordpress, web service, iis settings, etc)?
I am assuming an Image restore to a new instance will mean absolutely everything will be restored as on the initial instance correct?
So with all that said, would an EBS snapshot be enough as a backup solution?
An EBS Snapshot is a crash consistent backup of your volume. By crash consistent it means that it is as good as if your machine crashed (for example, you unplug your computer). It means that open files that have pending changes in buffers might not had been persisted to disk.
So it is not an application consistent backup such as those that can be done with applications that support VSS snapshots, but probably it will be good enough for basic disaster recovery.
Here you will find more info about crash consistent and application consistent backups.
Another important caveat is that for Windows instances, you want to create your AMIs by using Instances > Actions > Image > Create Image. If you try to create a Windows AMI from a volume, it will default to Linux and you won't be able to use them as an AMI to reinstantiate your Windows Server.
I am running n1-standard-1 (1 vCPU, 3.75 GB memory) Compute Instance , In my android app around 80 users are online write now and cpu Utilisation of instance is 99% and my app became less responsive. Kindly suggest me the workaround and If i need to upgrade , can I do that with same instance or new instance needs to be created.
Since your app is running already and users are connecting to it, you don't want to do the following process:
shut down the VM instance, keeping the boot disk and other disks
boot a more powerful instance, using the boot disk from step (1)
attach and mount any additional disks, if applicable
Instead, you might want to do the following:
create an additional VM instance with similar software/configuration
create a load balancer and add both the original and new VM to it as a backend
change your DNS name to point to the load balancer IP instead of the original VM instance
Now, your users will be randomly sent to a VM that's least-loaded to see the application, and you can add more VMs if your traffic increases.
You did not describe your application in detail, so it's unclear if each VM has local state (e.g., runs a database) or there's a database running externally. You will still need to figure out how to manage the stateful systems such as database or user-uploaded data from all the VM instances, which is hard to advise on given the little information in your quest.
I am new to GCE. I was able to create new instance using gcutil tool and GCE console. There are few questions unclear to me and need help:
1) Does GCE provides persistent disk when a new instance is created? I think its 10GB by default, not sure though. What is the right way to stop the instance without loosing data saved on it and what will be the charge (US zone) if say I need 20GB of disk space for that?
2) If I need SSL to enable HTTPS, is there any extra step I should do? I think I will need to add firewall as per the gcutil addfirewall command and create certificate (or install it from third part) ?
1) Persistent disk is definitely the way to go if you want a root drive on which data retention is independent of the life cycle of any virtual machine. When you create a Compute Engine instance via the Google Cloud Console, the “Boot Source” pull-down menu presents the following options for your boot device:
New persistent disk from image
New persistent disk from snapshot
Existing persistent disk
Scratch disk from image (not recommended)
The default option is the first one ("New persistent disk from image"), which creates a new 10 GB PD, named after your instance name with a 'boot-' prefix. You could also separately create a persistent disk and then select the "Existing persistent disk" option (along with the name of your existing disk) to use an existing PD as a boot device. In that case, your PD needs to have been pre-loaded with an image.
Re: your question about cost of a 20 GB PD, here are the PD pricing details.
Read more about Compute Engine persistent disks.
2) You can serve SSL/HTTPS traffic from a GCE instance. As you noted, you'll need to configure a firewall to allow your incoming SSL traffic (typically port 443) and you'll need to configure https service on your web server and install your desired certificate(s).
Read more about Compute Engine networking and firewalls.
As alternative approach i would suggest deploying VMs using Bitnami. There are many stacks you can choose from. This will save you time when deploying the VM. I would suggest you go with the SSD disks, as the pricing is close between magnetic disks and SSDs, but the performance boost is huge.
As for serving the content over SSL, you need to figure out how will the requests be processed. You can use NGINX or Apache servers. In this case you would need to configure the virtual hosts for default ports - 80 for non-encrypted and 443 for SSL traffic.
The easiest way to serve SSL traffic from your VM is generate SSL certificates using the Letsencrypt service.