VAST on Cloud for GCP

VAST on Cloud clusters in GCP are created using Terraform. Using Terraform files supplied by VAST, resources are created in a GCP project and then the cluster is installed on them.

Notice

This feature is available starting with VAST Cluster 5.2.0-SP3.

Configure the following in the GCP project, from  the GCP Console.

In Compute/VM Instances, enable the Compute API.

In the VPC Networks page, configure Private services access to your VPC by Allocating IP Ranges for Services and Creating Private Connections to Service.

In Network Services/Cloud NAT, create a Cloud NAT Gateway with these details, for each region that has a VoC cluster:

In Security/Secret Manager API, enable the Secret Manager API.

In Network Security/FIrewall, configure the firewall policies as follows.

Your GCP project should have these quotas:

To avoid problems when creating the cluster in GCP, organizational level policy constraints should not conflict with cluster requirements. For example, policies that restrict creation of n2 VMs.

Download the latest version of Terraform from here and follow the installation instructions in it.

You will receive a zip file from VAST that contains Terraform files that are used to create the VAST Cluster.

Extract the contents of the file into a folder. If you are creating more than one cluster, extract the contents of each zip file into a separate folder.

Create a file voc.auto.tfvars (use the file example.tfvars, from the zip file, as an example) with this content:

## required variables
name           = "<name>"
zone           = "<zone>"
subnetwork     = "<subnetwork>"
project_id     = "<project_id>"
nodes_count    = 8 # Minimum 8 - Maximum 14
ssh_public_key = "<public ssh key content>"
customer_name  = "<customer_name>"
## variables with defaults, when not provided, these defaults will be used
# network_tags                = []
# labels                      = {}
# ignore_nfs_permissions      = false
# enable_similarity           = false
# enable_callhome             = false
# replication_vips_per_node   = 0
# protocol_vips_per_node      = 0

where name is the name of the cluster, zone, subnetwork, and project_id are from the GCP Project.

In ssh_public_key, enter your SSH public key, similar to this:

ssh-rsa AAAAB*****************************************************************************zrysUvp0EkI5YWm+lmiQP4edfNKo0G3udxeAGdrD9dZSlzqmtdvo7CTW7Qhh3v2T3t3tvTEQnnNx8CkQOFDuU3Eje7NiN1XTp5C14dcGfaZeJnRnwaKhyD710ZHTeRyzjoXhNoAOuPT4qrT4MZ4jUUjr8Fx3ozByPlLco7qHsXurZHdTFWmdR52PlWRZA++9uyjz/sPYO+HcHxtIT5yS7DVfQz8zFQTyL0Rk82v6S0HNlG31mMlA2cPt0/r2vpY0U2zfijHdZEGxu+XeR/xRmVhPFImxN0rl

Optionally, set these variables, or use the default settings:

You can allocate VIPs for the cluster on GCP in the following ways.

Access the Vast on Cloud cluster VMS Web UI from a browser, using the  cluster_mgmt URL (from the terraform apply step, above)

To destroy the cluster, run this command:

terraform destroy

If you want to change the cluster settings in the voc.auto.tfvars file, you must first destroy and then rebuild the cluster using Terraform. Do not run terraform apply after making changes to the file - this will corrupt the cluster.

Warning

Data in the cluster is not preserved when the cluster is destroyed using Terraform (including when destroying it in order rebuild it).

Run the following commands  to rebuild the cluster after making changes to the file.

terraform destroy
terraform apply

The terraform files contained in the zip file contain important information used by Terraform to create your cluster. Take care that these files are not deleted or corrupted.

As well, it is recommended to back these files up.

It is also  required that you use separate folders and files for each cluster you are provisioning on GCP using Terraform.