Creating the First Google Cloud VM

In previous sections we covered the configuration of the network. Now we are going to create the first VM. As discussed in Computing Resources Used in this Tutorial, we need two disks. This section also discusses how to create the second disk.

1. Go to “Compute Engine” > “VM Instance” and click “Create” to create a new VM.

2. The “Create an instance” wizard appears.

3. Enter the name of the new VM: node-a (when you create 2nd or 3rd nodes, this would be node-b and node-c).

4. Select the Region and Zone of the VM. Enter a nearby region, then select the Zone. Select the zone ending with -a for node-a, -b for node-b and -c for node-c. Note that the zones in some regions may be named differently.

5. Select the machine configuration. Select the required CPU and Memory requirements based on the application you are protecting.

6. Select an operating system. By default, Debian GNU/Linux 10 is selected. Select an operating system that is supported by both LifeKeeper as well as the database and/or the application you are planning to use. Click “Change” and select Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

!If planning to create an SAP or SAP HANA cluster, select the “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 for SAP Applications” boot image in this step.

7. Before selecting “Create”, expand the drop down list for “Management, security, disks, networking, sole tenancy”.

8. Go to the Security Tab and enter the public key that was downloaded in the Creating a New SSH Key section.

*Make sure there is no whitespace if you copy and paste the public key.

9. Go to the “Disks” tab. We need an additional disk for data replication on node-a and node-b. To add the nodes, click “+ Add new disk“.

10. Specify the “Name” and the “Size” of the disk.

11. Go to the “Networking” tab. Specify “Network tags” and “Hostname”. The “Network tags” are used to identify the VM in the Firewall configuration (discussed in the next step).

12. Edit the network interface. Select the “Edit” icon.

13. Enter the parameters of the network interface as follows:

• Network: lk-vpc
• Subnetwork: lk-subnet (10.20.0.0/22)
• Primary internal IP: Ephemeral (Custom)
• Custom ephemeral IP address: 10.20.1.10 for node-a, 10.20.2.10 for node-b, 10.20.3.10 for node-c.
• External IP: Ephemeral
• IP forwarding: Off

Click “Done” once you enter the values.

Confirm the values you entered, then click “Create” at the bottom.

14. Congratulations! You have completed the configuration of the virtual machine.