Plan for Bare Metal Solution

This topic explains the key components of Bare Metal Solution to help you decide how to deploy servers, networking, and storage in your own Bare Metal Solution environment.

If you are running SAP HANA in your Bare Metal Solution environment, then see the SAP HANA on Bare Metal Solution planning guide.

Regional availability

Bare Metal Solution is currently available in the following Google Cloud regions:

Region	Location
asia-northeast1	Tokyo, Japan, APAC
asia-northeast3	Seoul, South Korea, APAC
asia-southeast1	Jurong West, Singapore, APAC
australia-southeast1	Sydney, Australia, APAC
europe-west2	London, England, Europe
europe-west3	Frankfurt, Germany, Europe
europe-west4	Eemshaven, Netherlands, Europe
europe-west6	Zurich, Switzerland, Europe
northamerica-northeast1	Montréal, Québec, Canada, North America
northamerica-northeast2	Toronto, Ontario, Canada, North America
southamerica-east1	Osasco, São Paulo, Brazil, South America
us-central1	Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA, North America
us-east4	Ashburn, Virginia, USA, North America
us-west2	Los Angeles, California, USA, North America

The following table shows the current Google Cloud regions that support SAP HANA on Bare Metal Solution.

Region	Location
europe-west3	Frankfurt, Germany, Europe
europe-west4	Eemshaven, Netherlands, Europe
us-central1	Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA, North America
us-east4	Ashburn, Virginia, USA, North America

If you do not see the region that you need in the preceding table, contact Google Cloud Sales.

Server configurations

Bare Metal Solution offers servers in pre-configured sizes, as shown in the following table.

Each bare-metal server comes with 200 GB of network attached storage for the boot disk.

By default, CPU hyper-threading is disabled in Bare Metal Solution servers. If you need hyper-threading, let your sales representative know or, if you already have Bare Metal Solution, open a service request.

Server name	CPU cores	vCPUs	Sockets	Memory	CPU platform	Ethernet ports
General-purpose servers
o2-standard-16-metal	8	16	2	192 GB	Intel Xeon Gold, 5200 series, 3.8 GHz	4 port 25GbE NIC
o2-standard-32-metal	16	32	2	384 GB	Intel Xeon Gold, 6200 series, 3.2 GHz	4 port 25GbE NIC
o2-standard-48-metal	24	48	2	768 GB	Intel Xeon Gold, 6200 series, 3.0 GHz	4 port 25GbE NIC
o2-standard-112-metal	56	112	2	1.5 TB	Intel Xeon Platinum, 8200 series, 2.2 GHz	4 port 25GbE NIC
High-memory general-purpose servers
o2-highmem-224-metal	112	224	4	3 TB	Intel Xeon Platinum, 8200 series, 2.7 GHz	4 port 25GbE NIC
Memory-optimized servers
o2-ultramem-672-metal	336	672	12	18 TB	Intel Xeon Platinum, 8200 series, 2.7 GHz	6 port 25GbE NIC
o2-ultramem-896-metal	448	896	16	24 TB	Intel Xeon Platinum, 8200 series, 2.7 GHz	8 port 25GbE NIC

Firmware

We recommend that you install the latest firmware version on your servers:

• TS54

To upgrade your servers to this firmware version, contact Customer Care. This version of firmware includes the following features and functionality:

• Support for interactive serial console.
• Reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features, such as adaptive double device data correction (ADDDC) and post package repair (PPR) to reduce DIMM errors, repair DIMM issues, and reduce maintenance downtime.
• Better reliability when a server shuts down or starts up.
• Bug fixes for a Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) security issue, reboot issues linked to loading the initial RAM disk, baseboard management controller (BMC) issues related to the IPMI internal client, and false alarms for fan status and CPU voltage.

Note:

• If you are running OVM on your Bare Metal Solution server, the firmware upgrade requires some OVM configuration changes. For more information, contact Customer Care. Also, see known issue OVM server can't connect to OVM Manager after TS54 firmware upgrade.
• We need a 5-day notice to schedule the upgrade. The upgrade requires approximately 10 hours to complete. We can upgrade up to 3 servers concurrently in a 10 hour window.

Operating systems

When you place an order for Bare Metal Solution, you can specify the operating system (OS) that you need installed on your servers. If you need an OS that does not appear in the following tables, contact Google Cloud Sales.

Note:

• You must obtain all necessary OS licenses from the OS vendor. Bare Metal Solution uses a bring-your-own-license (BYOL) licensing model.
• After your Bare Metal Solution environment is delivered to you, you are responsible for the configuration and management of your OSs, including applying updates and security patches and obtaining support.

Linux

You can request the installation of the following Linux OS vendor versions on your Bare Metal Solution servers:

General-purpose servers

• Oracle Linux
  • 7.9
  • 8.5
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
  • 7.9
  • 8.4
  • 8.5
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)
  • 15 SP1
• RHEL for SAP Solutions
  • 8.0
  • 8.1
• SLES for SAP Solutions
  • 12 SP4
  • 12 SP5
  • 15
  • 15 SP1

Memory-optimized servers (appropriate for SAP HANA)

• RHEL for SAP Solutions
  • 7.7
• SLES for SAP Solutions
  • 12 SP4
  • 15 SP1
  • 15 SP2

Hypervisors

When you place an order for Bare Metal Solution, you can request that a hypervisor be installed on your servers. If you request a hypervisor, you must install any guest operating system yourself.

Note:

• You must obtain all necessary licenses from the vendor of the hypervisor. Bare Metal Solution uses a bring-your-own-license (BYOL) licensing model.
• After Google Cloud delivers your Bare Metal Solution environment to you, you are responsible for maintaining your hypervisor and any guests, including applying updates and security patches.

You can request the following hypervisor:

• Oracle VM
  • 3.4.6

To use Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager (OLVM - a KVM-based hypervisor), request a compatible Linux OS such as Oracle Linux 7.

Storage

For storage in a Bare Metal Solution environment, you need to select the type of storage you need, know how to maximize the performance, and decide if you want to enable snapshots.

Storage choices

Storage devices in the regional extension provide local storage to Bare Metal Solution servers. There are three types of local storage you can request:

• Fibre Channel-based block storage presented as logical unit numbers (LUNs) and accessible by only one Bare Metal Solution server.
• Fibre Channel-based block storage presented as multipath LUNs and shared with multiple Bare Metal Solution servers. This option is good for high-availability applications, such as Oracle Database RAC.
• Network File System (NFS) storage. With NFS, you mount a shared storage directory on one or more Bare Metal Solution servers and access the directory like any other file system. For information on how to implement NFS, see Add NFS file storage to a Bare Metal Solution environment.

For Fibre Channel-based block storage, you can choose the following storage options in 1 TiB increments up to a maximum of 16 TiB. For NFS, you can choose the following storage options with a minimum of 100 GiB and a maximum of 16 TiB.

Storage type	Snapshot support	Common Workloads
SSD (solid-state drive)	Yes	Mission-critical production workloads
HDD (hard drive)	Yes	Local backups or archival workloads

Here are some additional storage volume considerations that you need to understand:

• When you provision any Fibre Channel or NFS storage volume, the volume size becomes fixed and you cannot expand the volume.
• If you need additional storage space, you need to purchase additional storage volumes.
• You cannot expand the existing LUNs in a storage volume. Instead, you need to order new LUNs and a new storage volume, migrate the old LUNs to the new storage volume, and decommission the old LUNs.
• When you migrate the LUNs to a new storage volume, you also need to migrate the data.
• If you run Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM), the following options are available:
  • When you need to expand an ASM disk group, you can order another storage volume, rescan the SCSI hosts to discover the new LUNs, and use ASM to add the new storage capacity into the disk group.
  • When you add, drop, or resize disks, ASM automatically initiates a rebalance to prevent an unnecessary load on the production database.
• When you remove a storage volume from service in a Bare Metal Solution environment, the Bare Metal Solution server reboots. The length of the outage can last from 20 minutes to an hour, depending on the size of your Bare Metal Solution server and the amount of storage attached to the server.

Storage performance

For Fibre Channel and NFS storage, Bare Metal Solution provides the following maximum throughput and input/output operations per second (IOPS) performance for an 8 KiB block size on an SSD drive:

Volume size	Read (IOPS)	Write (IOPS)	Throughput (MiBps)	Read/Write latency
1 TiB	7200	7200	56	< 1 ms
4 TiB	28800	28800	225	< 1 ms
8 TiB	57600	57600	450	< 1 ms
12 TiB	86400	86400	675	< 1 ms
16 TiB	115200	115200	900	< 1 ms

Note:

• We do not provide performance guidance for hard drives (HDD).
• SAP HANA on Bare Metal Solution uses a different storage model to meet SAP HANA storage requirements. For more information, see the SAP HANA on Bare Metal Solution planning guide.

Use the following storage recommendations to improve the performance of your databases and applications in your Bare Metal Solution environment:

• When you deploy multiple storage volumes, use consistent volume sizes to get consistent performance for databases and applications.
• We recommend that you configure 1 LUN for each volume with 4 TiB or less, and 8 LUNs for volumes with more than 4 TiB.
• When you add a new storage volume, always remember to rescan the LUNs to detect the new storage capacity.

Storage volume snapshots

The Bare Metal Solution provides options to save snapshots of your storage volumes to use for recovery purposes. Snapshots are available as follows:

• OS boot volume: Google Cloud takes a daily snapshot by default.
• Data volume: You can request daily snapshots when you place your initial order for Bare Metal Solution. You can also contact Customer Care to request data volume snapshots for existing storage volumes.

Note: Consider the following when requesting data volume snapshots:

• Google Cloud reserves 20% of the volume for snapshots. This leaves you with only 80% of the total volume to store data. For example, if you request 10 TiB of storage and enable snapshots, you receive 8 TiB of data storage and 2 TiB for the snapshot reserve.
• When you place your order for data volume snapshots, you need to tell Google Cloud which action we should take when the snapshot reserve fills up:
  • Delete the oldest snapshot first (recommended)
  • Delete the newest snapshot first
  • Take the volume offline

Google Cloud takes snapshots of the boot OS volume automatically every day at 12:10 AM in the region where your Bare Metal Solution servers are located. We also take a snapshot of your data volume if you have ordered this. We retain the snapshots for 7 days, and you cannot modify the schedule for these snapshots.

The following diagram shows the default process of how snapshots fill up a storage volume.

• When Google Cloud enables snapshots on a data volume, we reserve 80% of the volume for regular data and 20% of the volume for snapshots. The latter is called the snapshot reserve.
• When the snapshot reserve fills its original 20% space, the volume grows automatically by an additional 20%. This increases both the data area and the snapshot reserve proportionally.
• If the snapshot reserve becomes 100% full, snapshots spill over into the data area.
• If both the data area and snapshot reserve become 100% full, the volume goes offline to prevent corruption of the LUNs. Write operations are suspended.
• To bring the volume back online, you need to reclaim sufficient space in the volume by deleting prior snapshots.

Your data volume might fill up as the result of a high rate of data change within the LUN(s). For example, an application might write and delete large amounts of data within a 24-hour period.

To delete data volume snapshots and bring a data volume back online, or restore an OS boot volume snapshot, contact Customer Care.

Note: We do not recommend taking snapshots of volumes that you use for Oracle database files. Instead, take appropriate backups of your Oracle database with tools such as RMAN or solutions such as Actifio to meet your recovery point objective (RPO).

Networking

Each Bare Metal Solution environment resides in a secure region extension that is connected to the corresponding Google Cloud region by a Partner Interconnect connection that is provided and managed by Google Cloud.

Google Cloud monitors round-trip latencies between VM instances in Compute Engine zones and the Bare Metal Solution environment in the same region. For Google Cloud locations in Los Angeles, Ashburn, and London, median round-trip latencies are regularly measured at 0.6 ms to 1 ms.

Choose standard networking or explore advanced networking options

The standard networking configuration for Bare Metal Solution offers a basic network topology that is appropriate for most small-scale deployments. The standard networking configuration includes:

• Four physical interfaces for each Bare Metal Solution server. We bundle the interfaces into two logical interfaces called bonds. These bonded interfaces use a standard networking template to provide basic redundancy and load balancing.
  • One bonded interface connects to a single, client VLAN network to reach Google Cloud.
  • The second bonded interface connects to a single, private VLAN network for services and applications running locally in your Bare Metal Solution environment.
• A single Partner Interconnect connection with a single pair of VLAN attachments connects your Google Virtual Private Cloud to the client VLAN in your Bare Metal Solution environment.

If the standard networking configuration does not meet your needs, you can consider implementing some advanced networking capabilities. If you already have a Bare Metal Solution environment and would like to migrate to an advanced networking configuration, contact Customer Care. If you are a new customer and would like to implement an advanced networking configuration, contact Google Cloud Sales.

When you order an advanced networking configuration, the following options become available for more complex network deployments:

• Multiple VLANs
• Multiple VLAN attachments
• Multiple VPC connections
• Maximum transmission unit
• Network templates

Multiple VLANs

Instead of a single VLAN for each bonded interface, you can add multiple VLANs on the same bonded interface.

• The additional VLANs can be client VLANs, private VLANs, or a combination of both.
• You can add up to 10 VLANs per bonded interface and a total of 20 VLANs per server.

• You can enable routing between different client VLANs in the same networking environment.

  Note: A Private VLAN is an isolated network inside your Bare Metal Solution and cannot connect to other networking environments.

• To add multiple VLANs to your Bare Metal Solution servers, you have two options:

  • Request a server reimage and specify which VLANs you want added to the server bonded interfaces.

    Note: The reimage erases all data on the boot LUN.

  • Request a network change, then use your operating system to add the selected networks to the server bonded interfaces using information received from Google Cloud Support.

Multiple VLAN attachments

You can configure multiple VLAN attachments over a Partner Interconnect connection to your Bare Metal Solution environment.

• This provides more bandwidth between your VPC and the Bare Metal Solution environment than the bandwidth offered by a single set of VLAN attachments.
• The network load balances the traffic across the multiple VLAN attachments.
• Based on network conditions, total available bandwidth might be lower than the sum of the bandwidth of the Partner Interconnect connections.
• To configure multiple VLAN attachments, see Create the VLAN attachments for the Partner Interconnect connection.

Multiple VPC connections

You can connect the Bare Metal Solution environment to more than one Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) in your Google Cloud project.

Note: You cannot use the Bare Metal Solution environment as a transit path for routing between multiple Google VPC networks.

Maximum transmission unit

You must use the same maximum transmission unit (MTU) for every VLAN to ensure consistent switching between devices.

• Select either a normal frame size (1500 bytes) or jumbo frames (9000 bytes). Notify Google Cloud Sales of your choice and include your MTU size in the Additional notes sections for Servers and Networks when you fill out the intake form.
• Specify the same MTU for every VLAN in the client VLAN network and the private VLAN network.
• Configure the MTU on your Bare Metal Solution servers by using your server's operating system. For example, to configure jumbo frames on a Linux server, include the ip link set INTERFACE_NAME mtu 9000 command on all server interfaces.
• To verify the current MTU settings in a Linux server, issue the ip link show | grep mtu command.
• Do not change the MTU setting on your VLANs after initial provisioning.

Network templates

You can use network templates to enable a flexible network design of your choice, such as active/active and active/backup, to meet your needs for high availability, redundancy, and load balancing.

• Templates allow for different combinations of connections between server interfaces, bonds, and switch ports.
• To learn more about templates and request them for your Bare Metal Solution network, contact Google Cloud Sales.

Note: When you implement an advanced networking topology, network status might not appear correctly in the Google Cloud console or in the output of gcloud bms networks and networking API commands.

Partner Interconnect for Bare Metal Solution

The connection between your Google Cloud environment and your Bare Metal Solution environment uses the Partner Interconnect framework.

For more information about the Partner Interconnect framework, see the Partner Interconnect documentation, but keep in mind the following differences applicable in the context of Bare Metal Solution:

• Because Google Cloud manages the network connection, you provide pairing keys for the VLAN attachments to Google Cloud instead of a third-party service provider.
• This connection to the Bare Metal Solution environment is not subject to the pricing model that the Partner Interconnect product uses. For more information about the pricing model, talk to your Google Cloud Sales representative.

Note: You do not have to order or manage physical connections to your Bare Metal Solution instances. Google Cloud manages them for you.

Define your own IP address spaces

Bare Metal Solution enables you to bring your own IP subnets for use in the bare-metal environment. This enables you to fit your Bare Metal Solution into any existing IP address schema that your enterprise might have.

When you place an order for Bare Metal Solution, you provide two internal IP address ranges: a client IP address range for communication between your Google Cloud and Bare Metal Solution environments, and a private IP address range used for accessing services and devices within the Bare Metal Solution environment.

You can also select the specific IP addresses to use with each server. Consider the following guidelines:

• Make sure that no existing IP addresses in your VPC network or your extended on-premises network conflict with the IP ranges that you use for Bare Metal Solution environment.

• For every subnetwork that you request for Bare Metal Solution, Google Cloud reserves five IP addresses from the subnet range for administration purposes. These include the network address, the broadcast address, and the last three usable addresses in the range. For example, if you request the 100.64.0.0/27 subnet range, we reserve the following addresses:

  • 100.64.0.0: Network address
  • 100.64.0.28, 100.64.0.29, and 100.64.0.30: Last three usable addresses in the range.
  • 100.64.0.31: Broadcast address

• Request subnet ranges with at least a /27 subnet, so that you can assign the /28 subnet for Bare Metal Solution services. Subnets using /29 to /32 do not contain enough usable addresses for either Bare Metal Solution services or your Bare Metal Solution servers.

• In an auto mode VPC network, 10.128.0.0/9 CIDR block is reserved. See Auto mode IPv4 ranges. If you want to connect to an auto mode VPC network, use IP ranges outside of 10.128.0.0/9 for your Bare Metal Solution environment.

• Bare Metal Solution does not support Class E IP addresses (240.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.254).

Multi-region networking considerations

For any outside communication, including communication with services or your on-premises environments, the communication from your Bare Metal Solution environment must pass through the VPC network that you are using to connect to your Bare Metal Solution environment.

Consider using a single VPC network with global_dynamic routing enabled if your Bare Metal Solution environment will require access to other Google Cloud regions to connect to any of the following resources:

• Other Bare Metal Solution environments
• VMs in other regions
• Other Google Cloud services
• Your on-premises sites in other geographical locations

Using a VPC network with global dynamic routing enabled and custom route advertisements, you can set up a routed environment to connect your Bare Metal Solution instances directly to your Google Cloud and extended on-premises environments in other regions, without any additional configuration in Google Cloud.

Our recommendation is to advertise a default route on the BGP sessions to Bare Metal Solution. This enables you to:

• Avoid having to make change to routes to the Bare Metal Solution environment even if things change in your VPC subnets or your on-premises environments.
• Keep the routing table to Bare Metal Solution small and allow it to contain only one prefix.

Note: Your Cloud Router can terminate multiple BGP sessions from different environments, including your on-premises and Bare Metal Solution environments. If you set up custom advertisements, and want them to apply only to your Bare Metal Solution environment, use custom advertisements at the BGP session level instead of the Cloud Router level, as detailed in Setting up the Bare Metal Solution environment.

Network services and your Bare Metal Solution environment

As described earlier, Google Cloud recommends that you advertise a single default route to your Bare Metal Solution environment to keep the routing table simple. However, if your circumstances don't allow that, the routes that you need to expose to your Bare Metal Solution environment are determined by networks and services in your Google Cloud or on-premises environments that need access to the devices or applications in your Bare Metal Solution environment and vice-versa.

Some services that might require routes include NTP servers, DNS servers, LDAP servers, logging services, monitoring services, and so forth, as well as any other workloads and applications that need to communicate with the Bare Metal Solution environment.

Bare Metal Solution does not come with internet access. If you need to, you can setup routing to access the internet through any existing internet gateways that you have, either on Google Cloud or on premises.

Keeping routing simple

Outside of the other servers in the same Bare Metal Solution region, your servers likely need to communicate with one or more of the following:

• Your endpoints in your Google Cloud environment
• Your extended on-premises environment through your Google Cloud environment
• Your servers in Bare Metal Solution environments in other regions through your Google Cloud environment
• The internet through your Google Cloud environment

Note:

• For simplicity and flexibility, we recommend configuring a custom route advertisement with a default route (0.0.0.0/0).
• Your Cloud Router can terminate multiple BGP sessions from different environments, including your on-premises and Bare Metal Solution environments. To apply custom advertisements only to your BMS environment, use them at the BGP session level.

Firewalls and the Bare Metal Solution environment

When planning your firewall implementation for the Bare Metal Solution environment, there are a couple things to consider.

If you need to control traffic between the servers or applications within the Bare Metal Solution environment (east-west traffic), ask your Google Cloud sales representative for the available options.

In your VPC network on Google Cloud, you need to create firewall rules that allow incoming connections from the Bare Metal Solution environment.

Note: VPC firewalls do not apply to any traffic that transits your Google Cloud environment between, for example, your Bare Metal Solution environments and your other Bare Metal Solution or extended on-premises environments.

Required networking information for your Bare Metal Solution order

When you submit a Bare Metal Solution order, include the following networking information:

• The Google Cloud project ID that you are using with your Bare Metal Solution environment.
• The IP ranges that you intend to use in your Bare Metal Solution environment. For example, the client IP address range used for communication between your Google Cloud and Bare Metal Solution environments, and the private IP address range used for services and devices within the Bare Metal Solution environment.
• The number of VLANs you need in your Bare Metal Solution environment. Keep in mind that you need at least 2 VLANs for each Partner Interconnect.
• The bandwidth, in 1 Gbps increments, that you need between your Google Cloud environment and your Bare Metal Solution environment.