How-to guides

Creating VM instances

• Creating and starting a VM instance

  Create a virtual machine instance from an image or a snapshot.

• Creating and starting a preemptible VM instance

  Create a preemptible virtual machine instance.

• Adding or removing GPUs

  Add or remove GPUs from a virtual machine instance.

• Provisioning VMs on sole-tenant nodes

  Provision VMs on sole-tenant nodes to physically separate VMs from other projects.

• Creating customized boot disks

  Create a boot disk using a public image, a custom private image, or a snapshot from another boot disk.

• Creating and managing Windows Server instances

  Create Windows virtual machine instances on Compute Engine.

• Creating passwords for Windows instances

  Generate or reset the password for a Windows Compute Engine instance.

• Creating a Windows persistent disk snapshot

  Create snapshots of a Windows persistent disk and use those snapshots to create new persistent disks.

• Creating a Windows image

  Create a Windows operating system image that you can use to start new Windows instances on Compute Engine.

• Bring your own licenses with sole-tenant nodes

  Bring your licenses to Compute Engine.

• Determining server usage

  Learn how to determine physical server IDs for licensing requirements.

• Frequently asked questions

  Frequently asked questions around bringing your own license to Compute Engine.

• Automating Windows password generation

  Automate the generation of Windows passwords for your users.

• Using existing Microsoft application licenses

  Learn how to deploy eligible Microsoft Windows Server applications on Google Cloud using your existing app licenses.

• Creating SQL Server instances

  Create a SQL Server instance from an image family.

• Creating a VM instance with a custom machine type

  Create a virtual machine instance with custom virtualized hardware settings, such as a custom number of vCPUs and amount of memory, effectively using a custom machine type.

• Creating a VM instance from an instance template

  Create a virtual machine instance from an instance template.

• Creating a VM instance from an existing instance

  Create an instance using the same configuration of an existing instance.

• Creating a VM instance with a custom hostname

  Create an instance with a customized hostname.

• Creating instances that use the Compute Engine virtual network interface

  Create a new instance with the Compute Engine virtual network interface.

Managing access to VM instances

• Setting up OS Login

  Manage SSH access to Linux VM instances by using OS Login.

• Setting up OS Login with 2-step verification

  Add an extra layer of security to OS Login by using two-factor authentication.

• Managing OS Login in an organization

  Setup and manage OS Login at the organization level.

• Managing SSH keys in metadata

  Manage SSH access to Linux VM instances by using SSH key metadata.

Connecting to VM instances

• Connecting to instances

  Connect to Windows and Linux VM instances.

• Connecting to instances using advanced methods

  Connect to Windows and Linux VM instances using advanced methods.

• Transferring files to instances

  Transfer files to Windows and Linux VM instances.

Managing storage

• Adding or resizing persistent disks

  Add or resize persistent disks.

• Adding or resizing regional persistent disks

  Add or resize regional persistent disks.

• Adding local SSDs

  Add always-encrypted local solid-state drives to your instance.

• Connecting to Cloud Storage buckets

  Connect Cloud Storage buckets as common storage between your Compute Engine instances, your on-premises systems, and other Google Cloud services.

• Mounting in-memory RAM disks

  Allocate some memory to create a RAM disk with exceptionally low latency and high throughput but no automatic data replication.

• Optimizing persistent disk performance

  Learn how to optimize persistent disk storage for your workloads.

• Optimizing local SSD performance

  Learn how to optimize local SSD storage for your workloads.

• Benchmarking persistent disk performance

  Learn how to benchmark persistent disk performance.

• Benchmarking local SSD performance

  Learn how to benchmark local SSD performance.

Creating and managing instance templates

• Creating instance templates

  Create an instance template.

• Deterministic instance templates

  Learn about deterministic instance templates.

• Getting, listing, and deleting instance templates

  Learn how to get, list, and delete instance templates.

Working with machine images

• Working with machine images

  Learn how to create a machine image from a source instance or a source instance from a machine image.

Building and managing custom images

• Creating, deprecating, and deleting custom images

  Learn how to create, deprecate, and delete custom images.

• Sharing images and snapshots across projects

  Share images and snapshots across projects.

• Setting up trusted image policies

  Define organization policies that restrict the use of images in a project.

• Building custom operating systems

  Build your own operating system.

• Exporting a custom image to Cloud Storage

  Export a custom image to Cloud Storage.

Importing custom images and VM instances

• Choosing an import method

  Learn how to decide on the best import method for your use case.

• Importing virtual disks

  Import a virtual disk into Compute Engine using the images import tool.

• Importing virtual appliances

  Use OVF virtual appliances to import VM instances to Compute Engine.

• Manually import virtual disks

  Manually import boot disk image into Compute Engine.

• Manually configure imported images

  Optimize your manually imported boot disk image for Compute Engine.

Managing your instances

• Stopping and starting an instance

  Stop an instance temporarily or restart a stopped instance.

• Viewing source image

  View the source image for a VM.

• Deleting an instance

  Delete an instance permanently.

• Preventing accidental VM deletion

  Protect a VM instance from accidental deletion.

• Resetting or restarting an instance

  Restart a stopped instance, or perform a soft reset on a running instance.

• Working with persistent disk snapshots

  Use snapshots to back up data from your persistent disks.

• Creating scheduled snapshots for persistent disk

  Use snapshot schedules to automatically back up data from your persistent disks.

• Moving an instance between zones

  Learn how to move your instances between zones.

• Migrating a VM between networks

  Learn how to move your VM instances from one network to another.

• Applying sizing recommendations for VM instances

  Use Compute Engine machine type recommendations to resize your instance's machine type and to more efficiently use its resources.

• Changing the machine type of a stopped instance

  Learn how to change the machine type of a stopped instance.

• Specifying a minimum CPU platform for VM instances

  Set a baseline minimum CPU platform for a new or existing VM instance.

• Creating and enabling service accounts for instances

  Learn how to create and enable service accounts for your instances. Service accounts let you authenticate apps running on your instance to other Google Cloud services.

• Setting instance availability policies

  Learn how to set or update the scheduling options for your instances during maintenance events.

• Storing and retrieving instance metadata

  Every instance stores its metadata on a metadata server; this page shows how to query the metadata server programmatically.

• Migrating to v1 metadata server endpoint

  Learn how to migrate from the legacy v0.1 metadata endpoint.

• Modifying Shielded VM options

  Learn how to change Shielded VM settings like secure boot, measured boot, and integrity monitoring.

• Monitoring integrity on Shielded VM instances

  Learn how to monitor the boot integrity of Shielded VM instances using Cloud Monitoring.

• Installing the guest environment

  Install the guest environment for Compute Engine.

• Running startup scripts

  Create and run your own startup scripts on your virtual machine instances to perform automated tasks every time your instance boots up.

• Running shutdown scripts

  Create and run shutdown scripts that execute commands right before an instance is terminated or restarted.

• Viewing serial port output

  Learn to view serial port output, including using Cloud Logging to retain serial port output even after an instance is stopped or deleted.

• Interacting with the serial console

  Enable interactive access to the serial console of a virtual machine instance.

• Viewing referrers to VM instances (Beta)

  Explore the relationship between resources in your project.

• Enabling Virtio RNG

  Learn how to enable and test the Virtio RNG random number generator.

• Performing other tasks with your instances

  Learn a variety of less common tasks you might perform to manage your instances.

Creating and managing groups of instances

• Creating groups of managed instances

  Create and manage groups of virtual machine instances (also known as managed instance groups, or MIGs) that are based on an instance template.

• Working with managed instances

  Learn how to control the VMs inside a MIG.

• Getting info about MIGs and managed instances

  Get details about a managed instance group (MIG) and the VMs it manages.

• Setting up health checking and autohealing

  Improve availability by configuring application-based autohealing for your MIG.

• Distributing instances with regional managed instance groups

  Create MIGs that are distributed across a single region.

• Distributing instances with regional managed instance groups

  You can add instance groups to a target pool or backend service.

• Updating managed instance groups

  Perform updates on your MIG.

• Performing one-click OS image upgrades in MIGs

  Use image families and a rolling replace to update the OS of each managed instance in a MIG.

• Applying sizing recommendations for managed instance groups (beta)

  View and apply sizing recommendations for managed instance groups.

• Creating groups of unmanaged instances

  Group dissimilar VMs to accommodate pre-existing configurations for load balancing tasks.

Networking

• VPC documentation

  Learn more about using Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks by reviewing the VPC documentation.

• Locating IP addresses for an instance

  Locate the external and internal IP address for an instance.

• Reserving a static external IP address

  Reserve a static external IP address, promote an ephemeral IP address, and change the external IP address for an instance.

• Reserving a static internal IP address

  Reserve a static internal IP address or promote an ephemeral IP address.

• Using protocol forwarding

  Create forwarding rule objects that can send packets to a non-NAT'ed target instance.

• Creating a PTR record for a VM instance

  Create a PTR record for your VM instance.

Deploying containers

• Deploying containers on VMs and managed instance groups

  Learn how to deploy and update a container on a VM or a managed instance group.

• Configuring options to run your container

  Learn how to configure and update configuration options for containers, running on VM instances or managed instance groups.

Scaling your app

• Cloud CDN documentation

  Learn more about caching by reviewing the Cloud CDN documentation.

• Cloud Load Balancing documentation

  Learn more about using load balancing by reviewing the Cloud Load Balancing documentation.

• Autoscaling groups of instances

  Use autoscaling capabilities to automatically add or remove instances from a managed instance group based on increases or decreases in load.

• Scaling based on CPU utilization

  Perform autoscaling based on the CPU utilization of a group of virtual machine instances.

• Scaling based on load balancing serving capacity

  Perform autoscaling based on the HTTP(S) load balancing serving capacity of a group of instances.

• Scaling based on Monitoring metrics

  Set up autoscaler to scale based on a standard or custom metric provided by the Cloud Monitoring service.

• Using multiple policies

  Create an autoscaler with multiple scaling policies and the autoscaler will scale based on the policy that provides the largest number of virtual machine instances in the group.

• Understanding autoscaler behavior

  Understand autoscaler behavior when scaling your managed instance groups.

• Viewing autoscaler logs (beta)

  View and interpret logs related to autoscaling.

• Managing autoscalers

  Learn to perform administrative tasks for your autoscalers.

Managing compute accelerators

• Adding or Removing GPUs

  Add or remove GPUs from virtual machine instance.

• Creating groups of GPU instances using instance templates

  Create instance groups that have attached GPUs.

• Creating groups of GPU instances using instance templates

  Create instance groups that have attached GPUs.

• Installing GPU drivers

  Install GPU drivers.

• Installing GRID® drivers for virtual workstations

  Install GRID drivers for virtual workstations.

• Monitoring GPU performance

  Learn how to monitor GPU performance.

• Optimizing GPU performance

  Learn how to optimize GPU performance.

• Handling GPU host maintenance events

  Learn how to perform GPU host maintenance.

Managing operating systems

• Setting up VM Manager

  Learn about the diffent systems management services.

• Viewing operating system details

  View the operating system details for the operating system that is running on your VM instance.

• Creating patch jobs

  Create on-demand patch jobs for your VM instances.

• Managing patch jobs

  Learn how to view and modify existing patch jobs.

• Scheduling patch jobs

  Schedule a recurring or one-time patch job.

• Creating a guest policy

  Create a guest policy to deploy, query, and maintain consistent configurations on your VM instance.

• Managing guest policies

  Learn how to view and modify existing guest policies.

Monitoring activity

• Viewing audit logs

  View logs for API operations that are run in Compute Engine.

• Viewing usage reports

  Enable automatic exporting of detailed reports about your Compute Engine usage to a Cloud Storage bucket.

• Viewing activity logs (beta)

  View activity logs to track events that affect your project, such as API calls and system events.

Labeling resources

• Labeling resources

  Use labels to help organize your Compute Engine resources.

Granting access to Compute Engine resources

• Granting access to Compute Engine resources

  Learn how to grant only the necessary access to your resources.

Viewing available regions and zones

• Viewing available regions and zones

  View a list of available regions and zones.

Changing the default region or zone

• Viewing available regions and zones

  View a list of available regions and zones.

Migrating VMs to Compute Engine

• Overview of migrating VMs to Compute Engine

  Overview of options for migrating VMs to Compute Engine.

• Migrating VMs using Migrate for Compute Engine

  Migrate Linux or Windows VM instances using Migrate for Compute Engine.

Advanced virtual machine configurations

• Enabling nested virtualization for VM instances (beta)

  Enable support for nested virtualization on VM instances.

• Encrypting disks with customer-supplied encryption keys

  If you want to provide your own encryption keys, this section describes how to control and manage encryption yourself.

• Encrypting disks with customer-managed encryption keys

  If you want to use Cloud Key Management Service, this section describes how to manage Cloud KMS keys.

• Sending email from an instance

  Learn about the options you have for sending mail from Compute Engine and read some general recommendations.

• Sending email with SendGrid

  How to set up your instances so that they send email by using SendGrid.

• Sending email with Mailgun

  How to set up your instances so that they send email by using Mailgun.

• Sending email with Mailjet

  How to set up your instances so that they send email using Mailjet.

• Automated image builds with Jenkins, Packer, and Kubernetes

  Learn about two general approaches to building custom images and how to use several popular open source tools—including Jenkins, Packer, Docker, and Kubernetes—to create an automated pipeline to continuously build images.

Best practices

• Designing robust systems

  General tips about how to design a robust system to help mitigate instance downtime and be prepared for times where your instances have an unexpected failure.

• Securely connecting to VM instances

  Learn several methods for securing communications with Compute Engine instances with or without external IP addresses.

• Best practices for SQL Server instances

  Learn best practices for running a high-performance SQL Server instance.

• Image management best practices

  Learn how to manage Compute Engine images.

• Optimizing app latency with load balancing

  Learn how to use load balancing on Compute Engine.

• Best practices for floating IP addresses

  Learn how to use floating IP addresses.