In this article, I’m going to demonstrate how to configure a Virtual Machine(VM) on Google Cloud Platform.

  • Create a VM

Go to Home->Compute Engine, and “CREATE INSTANCE”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once an instance is created, it will have two IPs, internal & external. The external IP is dynamically allocated but you can obtain a fixed one ( an static IP is free if it’s attached to an VM, chargeable only if it’s not in use). Refer to below on how to make it permanent

You can then enable SSH access. Refer to on-line help for how to create SSH key; On Windows you use PuttyGen to generate SSH key and Putty to connect to this VM.

  • Installing VNC and start it during boot

Refer to below on how to install VNC

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-configure-vnc-on-ubuntu-16-04

  • Configure static IP

Go to “Home”-> “Networking”, Choose “External IP Addresses” and assign the static IP to this VM instance

  • Create a new disk and mount

Go to Compute Engine->Disk to add a disk. You can choose size and disk type (traditional disk or SSD). Of course size/disk type have different price tags.

Once disk is created, find it using the following

ls -l /dev/disk/by-id

Find the new disk’s unique ID so that you can mount it later during system boot time:

blkid /dev/sdb

Create the below entry in /etc/fstab so that it’s automatically mounted after system reboot:

UUID=0e9b2dc6-4eb9-47b2-9125-571a1e2aed59″     /media/postgres-data   ext4  defaults  0 0

In this case, I mount the disk to /media/postgres-data by using UUID (output from blkid above)

Note, for some reason, it appears this new entry is always cleared once the VM is rebooted, not sure why.

  • Access VM via console

Surprisingly Google offers you access to console of your VM. Follow below to connect console. I found it useful because after I modified my /etc/fstab, after reboot, I could not SSH to my VM. I needed to connect to VM via Console to fix my fstab entries!

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/interacting-with-serial-console

 

Configure Google Cloud Platform – Creating a virtual machine
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