I have a Vmware VM with a lot of snapshots that take a lot of space. I want to move VM to another disk, but only current state without snapshots because of space limitations. Is there any other way to do that than to copy whole VM with snapshots and then delete all the unnecessary ones then copy cleaned VM again to the desired location?
The better option is to create a "Full Clone" of that VM. In the snapshot manager, there should be the option to select the specific snapshot you wish to clone (including "Current State") and create a full clone of that VM. During the clone process you will be able to specify where the VM's files should be placed. The end result should not contain any of the snapshot information either.
More info: Cloning VMs in Workstation
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I am working in Google cloud platform and I have a situation where I need to attach local SSD disk to a existing VM machine but I cannot find a way to do it, Basically this is the process I need to do.
1. Attach a new local SSD disk
2. Copy the existing data to new disk
4. Unmount the old disk
5. Mount new disk to old data path
Thanks.
As John said, you can't if you initially created your VM without local SSD. But you can do something like this
Go to the console, select your current VM
Go the the boot disk section and select your boot disk
Create an image of the boot disk
Go back to the current VM page
Click on "create similar" button, on the top
Select the boot disk image that you just created
Add additional disk, with type local scratch SSD
Now you have a similar VM, with the same boot disk image but with local SSD.
Then, you have to detach the existing persistent disk on the old VM and attach it to the new one, make your copy, and delete it.
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)
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.
I have a VMware VM whose OS raw disk is backed up to AWS S3. I can create AMI from the OS disk raw using import-image. I cannot use import-image everytime because it is extremely slow and because I am creating an application where you can backup your VM to AWS cloud, where in the first backup will be FULL backup which will take longer, but the consequent INCREMENTAL backup should take very less time(depending on the amount of data changed).I am creating AMI during every backup i.e. FULL or INCREMENTAL backup.
Hence, it is OK and explainable that FULL backup is taking time but for INCREMENTAL it should take less time.
The problem is, while creating AMI from RAW data during incremental backup, AWS is not aware that there is already an AMI (and also corresponding EBS snapshot) created during FULL backup which should be used(or compared) with latest data to find data changes and hence should create AMI out of the changed data only, which will in turn take less time.
So, I have following options :
1) import-snapshot API = converts the raw OS disk to EBS snapshot file.
2) copy OS Disk data = create a EBS volume and attach it to a running EC2 instance. Then copy all OS disk raw data to the volume. Then create snapshot from the EBS volume. From the EBS snapshot, we can create AMI.
I have tried both options but everytime I try to launch EC2 instance from the AMI, I get below error :
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,0)
After going through various forums, I came to know that the above error occurs if there is mismatch in AKI and ARI while creating AMI from snapshot. Correct AKI and ARI is fetched from source EC2 instance from which the snapshot is created (as this is expected by AWS).
In my case, I have not created snapshot from a running EC2 instance but from a VMWare VM OS disk.
I figured out that import-image API also creates snapshots while creating AMI. So, I compared the snapshot created by import-image and the snapshot created by me using option-1 and option-2.
I compared the list of files in /boot/ and their md5sum. I found out the snapshot created by AWS import-image API has "initramfs-3.10.0-327.36.3.el7.x86_64.img.vmimport" file and has modified many files in /boot/grub2 directory.
As per AWS documentation, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vm-import/latest/userguide/vm-import-ug.pdf,
AWS modifies filesystem :
- installs Citrix PV drivers either directly in OS or modifies initrd/initramfs to contain them,
- modifies /etc/fstab,
- modifyies grub bootloader settings such as the default entry and timeout.
So, do I need to do above changes in my EBS volume as well ? How to do these changes (code, script, tool, etc) ?
Please suggest any better option if someone has.
I explored Packer but found out that it needs source_ami to create AMI, hence not applicable to me as I am not creating AMI from source AMI, Please correct me if I am wrong.
I have an ec2 instance that is hosting a CentOS AMI image and the root device is EBS , however it is not EBS optimized.
I have installed a few packages on it now I want to stop and start it again , Amazon documentation says that the EBS data would be available but the instance store data would be lost.
How do I know where(EBS or Instance store) my packages are stored ? I see that package files are in /opr /var /etc directories .
Will I loose my installed packages if I stop and start the Amazon ec2 instance ?
Thanks.
When you create an EBS backed instance (with ephemeral or instance store storage, and it doesn't matter whether it's optimized or not optimized) you don't lose data in your /opt or /var or /etc directory or any of the system data. So you are safe to stop and then restart it. Keep in mind that your internal and public IP addresses change once you restart it.
The only data that you lose is if you have ephemeral volumes which are generally mounted volumes with devices like /dev/sdb, /dev/xvdb, /dev/xvdc, etc.
If you create an instance store "only" instance then you lose everything. However, you will be able to tell if your instance is this type by not having the option to "stop" it. Meaning you can only terminate it. These are the first type of instances that EC2 offered when they started and maybe up until 3-4 years ago were the only ones, so they are not used that much AFAIK unless you need an ephemeral volume as your root volume.
[Edit]
This is what it's supposed to look like for an EBS backed instance (non-optimized):
You will not lose your data if the instance is setup as EBS.
EBS optimised is another option which adds additional IOPS, useful for busy database applications, etc.