Running a Photon OS Machine on GCE

Photon OS comes in a preconfigured image ready for Google Cloud Engine.

Example

The example in this section shows how to create a Photon OS instance on Google Cloud Engine with and without cloud-init user data.

Prerequisites

• You must have set up a GCE account and are ready to pay Google for its cloud services. The GCE-ready version of Photon OS is licensed as described in the Photon OS LICENSE guide. GCE and other environment-specific Packages are stored in the open using the following URL pattern: https://packages.vmware.com/photon/<release>/<revision>/gce

For example, the current GA revision of the 4.0 release would be located at the following URL: https://packages.vmware.com/photon/4.0/GA/gce/, and the 3.0 GA version would be located at: https://packages.vmware.com/photon/3.0/GA/gce/.

The GCE-ready image of Photon OS contains packages and scripts that prepare it for the Google cloud to save you time as you implement a compute cluster or develop cloud applications. The GCE-ready version of Photon OS adds the following packages to the [packages installed with the minimal version](https://github.com/vmware/photon/blob/master/common/data/packages_minimal.json): 

```
sudo, tar, which, google-daemon, google-startup-scripts, 
kubernetes, perl-DBD-SQLite, perl-DBIx-Simple, perl, ntp

- Verify that you have the `gcloud command-line tool`. 
    For more information see,  [https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gcloud-compute](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gcloud-compute).

### Procedure 

1. Use the following commands to create an instance of Photon OS from the Photon GCE image without using cloud-init. In the commands, you must replace `<bucket-name>` with the name of your bucket and the path to the Photon GCE tar file. 
	
    ```
$ gcloud compute instances list
	$ gcloud compute images list
	$ gcloud config list
	$ gsutil mb gs://<bucket-name>
	$ gsutil cp <path-to-photon-gce-image.tar.gz> gs://<bucket-name>/photon-gce.tar.gz
	$ gcloud compute images create photon-gce-image --source-uri gs://<bucket-name>/photon-gce.tar.gz 
	$ gcloud compute instances create photon-gce-vm --machine-type "n1-standard-1" --image photon-gce-image
	$ gcloud compute instances describe photon-gce-vm

1. To create a new instance of a Photon OS machine and configure it with a cloud-init user data file, replace the gcloud compute instances create command in the example above with the following command. Before running this command, you must upload your user-data file to Google’s cloud infrastructure and replace <path-to-userdata-file> with its path and file name.

   gcloud compute instances create photon-gce-vm --machine-type "n1-standard-1" --image photon-gce-vm --metadata-from-file=user-data=<path-to-userdata-file>
   

     
    You can also add a cloud-init user-data file to an existing instance of a Photon OS machine on GCE: 
	
    ```
gcloud compute instances add-metadata photon-gce-vm --metadata-from-file=user-data=<path-to-userdata-file>