Licensing mapping
In this we will learn and understand about Licensing mapping.
However, bringing your existing physical-core or physical-processor licenses that have dedicated hardware requirements requires you to bring your own media. And, to run that media on hardware configurations, such as sole-tenant nodes, that are compliant with your licenses. You can bring images with existing licenses in any region that supports sole-tenant nodes. Although there is no additional charge for bringing images with existing licenses, you must still pay for your licenses according to your agreements.
Further, to bring images with existing licenses to Google Cloud, you must do the following:
- Firstly, prepare the images according to your license agreements.
- Secondly, activate your licenses.
- Thirdly, import virtual disk files and create images from those disk files.
- Then, create sole-tenant node templates.
- After that, create sole-tenant node groups from the node templates.
- Provision VMs on the node groups with the imported virtual disk files. And, track the license usage of your VMs.
- Lastly, report license consumption to your vendor.
Importing and creating an image from an offline virtual disk
To provision VMs with your existing licenses, you must bring your own media. However, images based on a Google Cloud premium image are not eligible for BYOL. This is because premium images require pay-as-you-go licenses from Google. And, if you have virtual disks in your on-premises environment with software configurations or licenses that you need, the import virtual disk tool can help you do the following:
- Firstly, import your customized virtual disks with a supported operating system and create images based on those disks.
- Secondly, set up the appropriate license configuration.
- Lastly, install the packages and drivers necessary for compatibility with Google Cloud.
Further, to start a VM with your own license, import a virtual disk with the OS you want to use. You can import virtual disks from Cloud Storage buckets and local workstations. When importing a virtual disk file from a local workstation, the image import tool uploads your image file to Cloud Storage, and, if necessary, creates a new Cloud Storage bucket. Then, the import tool copies the file to Compute Engine and creates a bootable image from the virtual disk file.
Permissions required for this task
- Firstly, in the Cloud Console, go to the Images page.
- Secondly, click Create image. And, specify a name for the image.
- Thirdly, under Source, choose Virtual disk (VMDK, VHD).
- Then, under Cloud Storage file, choose Browse and browse to the Cloud Storage location of the image to import.
- After that, under Operating system on virtual disk, choose the operating system of the image that you are importing. Here, make sure that Install guest packages is selected, so that the image you are importing is bootable.
- Lastly, expand License key options. Under OS License, choose Use your own license key. And, click Create to import the image.
Creating a sole-tenant node template
After importing the image, create a sole-tenant node template. You will use this node template to create a sole-tenant node group to run your image on. However, the node templates page doesn’t list the region and zone of the template, but node groups must be created in a zone within the region where you created the node template. Further, to create a template, you must first create a node group, but you only need to complete the steps as far as choosing the region and zone. After that, you can create the template and not continue on to create the node group if you want to.
Permissions required for this task
- Firstly, in the Google Cloud Console, go to the Sole-tenant nodes page.
- Secondly, click Create node group. And, enter a Name for the node group.
- Thirdly, select the Region and Zone for the node group.
- Then, under Node template properties, select Create node template.
- After that, in the Create a node template dialog, specify a Name, a Node type, a Local SSD, and a GPU accelerator.
- Next, under CPU overcommit, choose whether to enable CPU overcommit.
- Optional: Under Affinity labels, click Add affinity label to add a key-value pair as a node affinity label.
- After that, click Create to finish creating your node template.
- Lastly, click Cancel to cancel out of creating a node group.
Provisioning a sole-tenant VM
Provision a VM on the node group, and specify the VM’s restart behavior. If you previously specified that your node groups restart hosted VMs within the same node group during a maintenance event. Then, when you create a new VM instance on that node group, specify that the new VM do one of the following:
- Firstly, migrate after a restart due to a maintenance event.
- Secondly, stop and then restart on the same host. If the same host is not available, a new server is provisioned, and the physical ID of the previous host is not reused.
Permissions required for this task
If you used node affinity labels in the template, you can create multiple VMs by using managed instance groups (MIGs) and specifying the node affinity labels under Sole-tenant nodes settings, or, create individual VMs from the node group details page:
- Firstly, in the Google Cloud Console, go to the Sole-tenant nodes page.
- Secondly, click the Name of the node group to provision a VM on.
- Thirdly, create a VM on a sole-tenant node by doing one of the following:
- To create a VM anywhere in the sole-tenant node group, click Create instance.
- To create a VM on a specific sole-tenant node, click the Name of a sole-tenant node group, then click the Name of a sole-tenant node, then click Create instance.
- After that, configure the sole-tenant VM. Because you already selected your node group or a specific node, the Region, Zone, and Node affinity labels are already specified by the template.
- Then, select a Machine configuration by specifying the Machine family, Series, and Machine type.
- Next, select the Boot disk for the sole-tenant VM, which is the previously imported virtual disk image.
- Select the Management tab:
- Under Availability policy > On host maintenance, select the restart behavior of the VM.
- Under Automatic Restart, select On (recommended) or Off.
- Lastly, click Create.
Reference: Google Documentation