Multiple VNICs issue in GCE VM instance

[Amiya mohakud]

Today I was going through on how to use Google Cloud Engine for my application. I was able to create a VM instance with Trial version. But the sad part is , in order to run my application I need 4 VNICs in that VM. But unfortunately when the VM instance came up, there is only 1 VNIC configured. And I did not find any way how to get multiple NICs configured in my VM.

 

So basically I was not able to run my applications on that VM. I would like to know if there is any way we can have multiple VNICs in GCE VM or is it a limitation in GCE or is this feature available with paid account. Please reply back asap.

Regards

--amiya

[Anthony Voellm]

Can you detail what you are looking to achieve with multiple NICs.

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[Amiya]

Hi Anthony,

Thanks for your reply.

With Multiple NICs, I want to host a performance oriented Gateway application which needs 2 NICs for traffic, 1 NIC for Management data and 1 NIC for high availability. The traffic load on each NIC is too high and we cannot combine any of the ports together.  

If you want to propose multiple VMs to support multiple NICs, then the application will need huge changes which would be too difficult to accommodate and I think it can raise some performance issues. 

Please let me know if you have any alternative thoughts or resolutions.

Regards

--Amiya

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Best Regards,

--Amiya

[Anthony Voellm]

An n1-standard-8 can do upwards of 7.5 Gbps so likely perf won't be an issue.

In terms of a management NIC that is something you do in a physical DC.  In Cloud there are other ways to achieve redundancy and avoid saturation, but I do understand the appeal for separation of concerns.

If you can manage with just port config it would be integrating to see how well your app does.

[Amiya]

What is the NIC speed in a n1-standard-8 machine?

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Best Regards,

--Amiya

[Amiya]

Just wanted to know if GCE doesnt support multiple NICs as of now and is there any roadmap/plan for this?

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Best Regards,

--Amiya

[Anthony Voellm]

GCE throttles at 2 Gbps per vCPU with a current limit of 10Gbps.  An n-standard-1 can do about 1.5 Gbps.  Ubuntu and Debian Backports images are tuned to get these.

[Amiya]

Just wanted to know if GCE doesnt support multiple NICs as of now and is there any roadmap/plan for this?

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Best Regards,

--Amiya

[Anthony Voellm]

It is not supported.

[Amiya]

Thanks for all this information.

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Best Regards,

--Amiya

[Amiya]

Hi

Need help on some queries:

I want to upload my private image and create a VM with my private image. I have an .iso image. I have renamed it to disk.raw and made a tar.gz file and trying to upload the image to google storage as per https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/images

It's taking too long time as the file size is around 2.66GB. The uploading has been cancelled in between and resumed again. So I faced the below error:

C:\Program Files\Google\Cloud SDK>gsutil cp D:\sbcswe.tar.gz gs://amiya_sbcswe

Copying file://D:\sbcswe.tar.gz [Content-Type=application/x-tar]...

==> NOTE: You are uploading one or more large file(s), which would run

significantly faster if you enable parallel composite uploads. This

feature can be enabled by editing the

"parallel_composite_upload_threshold" value in your .boto

configuration file. However, note that if you do this you and any

users that download such composite files will need to have a compiled

crcmod installed (see "gsutil help crcmod").

Catching up md5 for file://D:\sbcswe.tar.gz...                   2.06 GiB/2.66 GiB

Uploading   gs://amiya_sbcswe/sbcswe.tar.gz:                     2.66 GiB/2.66 GiB

ResumableUploadAbortException: 404 Bad Request

I tried one more time for uploading the image, but encountered another error as below:

C:\Program Files\Google\Cloud SDK>gsutil cp D:\sbcswe.tar.gz gs://ganapati_sbcsw

Copying file://D:\sbcswe.tar.gz [Content-Type=application/x-tar]...

==> NOTE: You are uploading one or more large file(s), which would run

significantly faster if you enable parallel composite uploads. This

feature can be enabled by editing the

"parallel_composite_upload_threshold" value in your .boto

configuration file. However, note that if you do this you and any

users that download such composite files will need to have a compiled

crcmod installed (see "gsutil help crcmod").

 

Resuming upload for file://D:\sbcswe.tar.gz

Failure: long int too large to convert to int.:                  0 B/2.66 GiB

I just want to know if google storage comes free with  my free trial of Google compute Engine. If not, is it causing the problem. If so, how can I be able to upload my image to google storage. Please clarify which will be great help for me.

Thanks

--Amiya

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Best Regards,

--Amiya

[Anthony Voellm]

Did you get this to work? 

[Amiya]

Hi Anthony,

I am able to upload the image to Google storage. But it was a .iso image which GCE doesn't recognize and GCE instance creation is failing.

I am still struggling to bring up a GCE instance with custom image. AS GCE only understands RAW images and in my case, the size of RAW image is too huge around 60GB, which is not feasible to upload.

Is there any other way I can bring up a GCE instance with my custom image? Please help. 

Thanks for your support till now.

Regards

Amiya 

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Best Regards,

--Amiya

[Amiya]

​For me , the huge size of RAW image is a big problem NOW. If I can find an way to ​overcome this, it will be a great help.

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Best Regards,

--Amiya

[Anthony Voellm]

The size of image should not matter.  More than likely you are missing needed drivers.  Every Cloud has a slightly different set.  For GCS we use the VirtIO drivers, etc.

What you might want to do is create a GCE VM of the same flavor image.  If you use RedHat boot a GCE RedHat image.  Then get an ISO mounter for Linux and compare what's missing in the default image and you ISO.  Or copy in everything but the Kernel and driver components.

Hope this helps... images are tricky even when moving from say CentOS to Ubuntu or the other direction.

[Amiya]

Hi Anthony,

I am facing one problem while trying to launch a GCE instance. I wanted to launch a GCE instance from an already existing AMI instance. 

As per the guidelines mentioned here https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/images#private_images

we can create an AMI from a running instance using ec2-bundle-vol tool. I googled around on this and found that ec2-bundle-vol can be used to bundle an instance-store-backed (S3 storage) amazon instance, but not for EBS-backed instance. 

SO just wanted to check if we can still use ec2-bundle-vol to create an AMI image from EBS-backed instance?? Please confirm on this.

My amazon instance is EBS backed. I am able to create an image from EBS-backed instance, but seems it cannot be downloaded and cant be transferred. Looks like Its only internal to AWS and we can only launch amazon instances from that image. So please suggest how we can download/transfer an AMI image of EBS-backed instance?

 

Regards

--Amiya

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Best Regards,

--Amiya

[Anthony Voellm]

Here are step by step directions...

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/images#import_an_ami_image

[Amiya]

Hi

Is there any way I can get a serial console to a GCE instance, so that when I will boot my OS, I can provide inputs for some interactive commands. I already know we can view the console output, but I want to get serial console access to the VM so that I can give some inputs during my OS installation.

Regards

--Amiya

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Best Regards,

--Amiya

[Anthony Voellm]

Amiya,

There is no input on the serial console today.  What you can do is use the Instance metadata to tunnel input into and out of the VM.

For example you could have a boot script that waits on a metadata key changes (there is a wait API) and then passes that input to the serial console input inside the VM.

Here is a link to using VM metadata - https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/reference/latest/instances/setMetadata

  Tony

[Amiya]

Hi,

Thanks for your help. I am able to bring up my OS in Google Cloud now.

I have few more queries for you. Request you to please clarify the same.

1.  Can we rename the network interface in a Google instance?? I tried renaming it through udev, but I lost the connection to the instance. The below error is coming in my console

[....] Configuring network interfaces...Ignoring unknown interface mgt0=mgt0.
 [?25l [?1c 7 [1G[ [32m ok  [39;49m 8 [?25h [?0cdone.

Please let me know if this can be done or not.

Regards

--Amiya 

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Best Regards,

--Amiya

[Anthony Voellm]

I don't believe NIC renamng is supported. You can however set up a symlink to the device if your app needs a particular device name..