VMs overview

Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped virtual machine (VM) management lets you provision and deploy VMs, and manage each VM through its lifecycle.

The VM manager features the following areas:

  • VM lifecycle: Provision and manage VMs of arbitrary shape and size, using kubectl commands, the API, Distributed Cloud CLI, or the GDC console.
  • Image management: Use either an operating system (OS) image Distributed Cloud provides or a custom OS image. You can build custom OS images from a provided OS image, or from your own image.
  • Guest OS agent: Manage your VM access and observability. Serve advanced package tool (APT) packages, with their dependencies, to your VMs.
  • Networking: Integrate with Distributed Cloud networking to maintain stable ingress and egress IP addresses.
  • Storage: Access durable boot or secondary disks, disk snapshots, and machine backups through tight integration with storage.
  • Disaster recovery: Use disk-level snapshots and complete VM backups for disaster recovery.

VM instruction sets

Instructions in this documentation set are presented for the kubectl CLI, the GDC console, the gdcloud CLI, or the API, as applicable. In cases where only kubectl or the GDC console is available, the instruction set reflects that status. For example, if a feature supports only two of the three instruction sets, you see only those two sets of instructions.

Use these instructions after you download and install gdcloud CLI on your computer and have completed any open tasks listed on the Preparation page.

What's next

To get started, go to the Create and start a VM instance page.