Last week we announced several updates to GoGrid’s cloud infrastructure services. One of the highlights of this update was the enhancement we made to the saving your GoGrid Server Images (MyGSI) process.

Up till now, saving your MyGSI has been a fairly simple 3-step process that was helpful for horizontal scaling, re-imaging of servers, disaster recovery, or setting up failover environments. Through the update, this process can now be completed in a single step.

We’ve created several helpful tutorials to help educate users on the new process. Please reference our video and text tutorials below or take a look at the MyGSI User Manual on the GoGrid wiki for more information regarding the new process.

Video Tutorial

Below is a video screencast on how to create a GoGrid Custom Server Image (MyGSI). (Direct YouTube link)

Text Tutorial

To create a GoGrid Server Image (MyGSI), the process is very simple and easy to do. First, within the Grid View, click on the server you want to create a Server Image from. When you do that, a Save icon will appear (see the green arrow below):

The Save button is also in the List view:

Once you choose the server that you want to save and click the Save icon or link, you will get the following prompt:

Note that if your server has more than 50 GB of data on it, the saving process will fail and you will need to reduce the amount of data on your server.

Simply give your server image a name, description, and indicate whether it is a Web or Database server.

After this, you server will be gracefully shut down, and the image saving process will start. You will see your server’s status light turn to amber:

And there will be an entry in the Jobs tab that not only states that the action has started, but also after a few seconds, displays the expected time for the server to be fully saved to cloud storage. If there is no “Estimated Job Duration,” just wait a minute and refresh the Jobs tab.

Your server will come back on line shortly.

Once the server image is created, you have the ability to instantiate new servers from it, or share it with the GoGrid community as a Community GSI (CGSI).

Lastly, the MyGSI process is backwards compatible, meaning that if you had created a Sandbox Server previously and it still appears within your GoGrid account, you can still convert it into a MyGSI using the same older process. Also, any MyGSIs created using the legacy process will still be available to create new server instances. However, the creation of Sandbox Images has been removed as of this release, and replaced with the much easier process described above.

Have any questions about the MyGSI update? Contact our support team. We’re excited to help you!

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Michael Sheehan

Technology Evangelist at GoGrid

Michael Sheehan is the Technology Evangelist for GoGrid & "Social Media Strategist" as well. He handles digital media marketing, online audience development, PR, media relations, content creation and editing as well as a variety of other tasks. He is also an avid social media pundit and technology blogger.

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Tags: Community Server Image, Custom Server Image, GoGrid, GSI, How To, MyGSI, Screencast, Server Image, Update, Video
This entry was posted on Monday, March 14th, 2011 at 9:24 am and is filed under Cloud Computing, Features, General, GoGrid, How To, Images, Screencast, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.