Google Cloud snapshot's boot issue - google-cloud-platform

Hope all are safe and doing well.
I have few running servers on google cloud and for them, snapshots are scheduled on daily basis in an incremental way.
I am trying to create a new instance on a different VPC zone by using the same snapshots but it will be giving me an error.
For reference, I have added an attachment to this question.
Please help me to resolve this issue and thanks in advance.

Assuming that you have created a Snapshot with Application consistency(VSS) enabled:
When you create a VSS snapshot, Windows Server marks the volume in the
snapshot as read-only. Any disks that you create from the VSS
snapshot are also in read-only mode. So, the read-only flag on the new
boot disk prevents the VM instance from booting correctly.
You can follow this documentation to resolve your issue here.
If the disk you created from the VSS snapshot is a boot disk and you want to use it to boot a VM instance, you must temporarily attach the disk to a separate, existing VM instance. Once you complete the following steps, you can detach the disk from that existing VM instance and use it to boot a new VM instance.

Related

Accidentally deleted GCP instance connected to AI notebook

I accidentally deleted my ai notebook vm and I hadn't downloaded the notebooks connected to it. I still have the url. Does anybody know if there's a way for me to recover my work?
According to the documentation, there is a life cycle for the instances. Verify the state of your AI Notebook VM to make sure that it is deleted or just turned off.
Unfortunately, if an AI Notebook instance is deleted and there is no snapshot configured, there is no way to restore that instance neither recover the notebooks stored there. There are three ways to prevent this from happening in the future:
Create snapshots to periodically or schedule back up data from your zonal persistent disks (snapshot can be located in multiple zones) or regional persistent disks (You must indicate the region where the disk is located ).
Edit VM instance, go to the deletion protection checkbox to enable it as this option is disabled by default. This setup will avoid that your Notebook instance was deleted by accident.
In the VM instance, go to boot disk, in the drop down list under “When deleting instance” select “Keep Disk” (or you can use gcloud command to disable set-disk-auto-delete)

EDIT: How to restore instance from scheduled snapshots in GCP

I have a scheduled daily snapshot in GCP for one of my instances. I have several snapshots now. The first one is the full snapshot and the rest of the snapshots only contain changed data.
I want to be able to restore and boot the instance but it fails to boot. Checking the serial console I see reference to a blue screen and then it reboots and shows the same errors again, repeating the reboot cycle.
I have followed the guide in GCP on how to restore an instance from a snapshot by creating a new instance, selecting the snapshot tab and then selecting my snapshot. After saving the instance and trying to boot it I get the blue screen message.
Also, if I create a new instance and use a Windows 2008 R2 Datacenter image the system obviously boots fine but if I try to attach the snapshot disk as a secondary disk (non-boot) then I get the error: Editing VM instance failed. Error: Supplied fingerprint does not match current metadata fingerprint. I'm not sure if this is related to my issue with unable to boot the OS from my snapshot.
I did find a workaround:
1) create an image of running instance (my instance is Win'2008 R2 Datacenter)
2) enable scheduled snapshots of this new instance (with VSS)
3) wait for a scheduled snapshot to get created (hourly so must wait 1 hr)
4) create new instance from the scheduled snapshot
After all this work the instance boots just fine with all my data. Obviously not a very good workaround as now I have two instances with the same data. So I have to schedule the production system for maintenance so that I can bring it down and use the new instance so that future scheduled snapshots work if I try to restore it again. A major paint in the butt.
Anyone have any ideas as to why none of my instances boot from scheduled snapshots without my workaround? Manual snapshots work fine. And new instances also work fine with the same snapshot schedule.
I had this exact same problem. I tried multiple scheduled snapshots with the same result UNTIL I made a change in the VM Instance when attaching the restored snapshot. Maybe it's just Windows but if you named the disk something different then it seems to fail.
My original disk was called disk-1 for example. When I restored the snapshot I did it to disk-1-a and attached it to my instance. It failed the same way yours did. When I attach it and under "Device name" for the boot disk, select Custom and entered my original disk name of disk-1, it booted and RDP worked.

What is Amazon EC2 Bundle Tasks

What is AWS EC2 Bundle Tasks?
Could any one please help me to understand what it is?
And any one help in showing a sample demo of it by steps or screenshot?
In the old days, before Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon EC2 instances were booted from Instance Store.
Instance Store is a disk that is directly connected to the host computer, which means that when an instance is turned off, the contents of the disk is lost (because the disk will be assigned to the next user who uses a Virtual Machine on that host).
This also meant that instances could not be stopped and started again, because the boot disk is lost.
These days, Amazon EBS provides network-attached storage, which persists even when an instance is stopped (and, if desired, even after an instance is terminated).
According to this article, Bundle Tasks is/was a process designed to get a Windows instance ready for booting from Instance Store:
See: Bundle Tasks in Amazon | Zeeshan Ali Shah's Blog
There is little reason to use this process these days.

Restore managed OS disk of GCP instance using snapshot to existing VM

I am trying to restore OS disk of GCP instance to existing VM, by using Snapshot taken, of OS disk, is there any API provided by Google Cloud Platform to do same.I can't find anything to help me restore a snapshot to an existing disk. Is this even possible?
You can restore a boot disk from a snapshot as described here; however, it will be given a different Instance ID. VM Instance IDs are unique to each one you create.

permanent Windows session on Amazon EC2

i'd like to have a remote PC where i could install Visual Studio & other softwares that it would be permanent
all i've tried for now is volatile so i can't reinstall everything every time i want to use the remote PC.
i've searched online but all solutions talked about EBS (Elastic Block Store)
i even went to http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ but i can't find EBS in the AWS panel...
where can i get EBS? or is there another way to get a permanent Windows on EC2?
thanks
Jeff
When you launch an EC2 instance you get a root volume (c:) on EBS by default, it would only be transient if you are using instance storage. To check that, verify the "root device type" property of your Windows image (AMI).
Additional EBS or Instance Store volumes can be added in the "Add Storage" section of the launch wizard.
You can also create an image from the existing instance (Actions > Create Image) and then launch it as many times as you'd like.
Additionally, for persistent desktop sessions, check Amazon Workspaces.