Create a Virtual Machine

Create a virtual Machine in GCP.

You must have already created a virtual network with a subnet and added a firewall rule.

GCP documentation can be found at Virtual Machine Instances and Creating and Starting a VM Instance.

  1. Login to the GCP console.
  2. Click the navigation menu () located in the upper left-hand corner of the web page.
  3. Click Compute Engine > VM instances.
  4. Click CREATE INSTANCE.
  5. Enter the following to create a virtual machine:
    1. For Name, enter a name for the virtual machine.
      The name can be anything meaningful to your organization, e.g., bursting-vm.
    2. For Zone, select a zone that is in the same Region as the subnet of the previously created VPC.
    3. In the Machine type, click the Customize link. Choose a family (Compute Optimised) and then a machine type from the dropdown.
      Figure 1. Customize the Machine Type

      Customize the Machine Type
    4. Specify the CPUs, GPUs and RAM.
      Consider the nature of the applications that you plan to deploy on the instance, the number of users that you expect to use the applications, and also how you expect the load to scale in the future. Remember to also factor in the CPU and memory resources that are necessary for the operating system.
    5. For Boot disk, click Change.
    6. Choose an OS that supports cloud-init and is supported by your workload manager.
    7. For Boot disk type, choose one of the following options:
      • Standard persistent disk
      • SSD persistent disk

      Choose SSD for I/O-intensive applications, where low latency and high throughput are critical. For testing, consider Standard persistent disk to keep costs down.

    8. For Size, specify the size of the boot disk.
    9. Click Select.
    10. Under Identity and API access, for Service Account, select No service account.
    11. For Firewall, choose Allow HTTP traffic and Allow HTTPS traffic.
    12. Click the Networking, Disks, security, Management, Sole-Tenancy dropdown to get the list of options available.
    13. Click the Networking section.
    14. Click the default network menu and choose the VPC you created previously.
    15. For Network Service Tier, click Standard.
    16. Click Done.
    17. Delete any default network interfaces that might have been automatically generated.
    18. Click the Security section.
    19. For SSH Keys, copy the SSH public key (i.e., id_rsa.pub) of a user account that exists on your site's workload manager and paste it. Append ==<username>at the end of your key. e.g. ==centos.
      This user will have sudo rights and will be able to SSH into the VM to install the PBS MoM.
  6. Click CREATE.
    Creating the virtual machine may take some time.