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!

On Wednesday February 24, 2010, GoGrid hosted a webinar for new and existing GoGrid users designed to discuss the recent February 2010 Feature updates to GoGrid. There is a blog post that details all of the new features included in the release as well as a screencast which walks through these features and important changes. The webinar covered the following information:

• What is our view of Cloud Computing
• What is GoGrid
• New feature: GoGrid Dedicated Servers
• What is Hybrid Infrastructure
• A GoGrid Portal Demo
• Deploying a GoGrid Dedicated Server
• The new GoGrid List View
• Walk-through of other Interface Enhancements & Links
• Question & Answer Session

The entire Webinar is below and is broken into two parts:

• Part One – Overview presentation, discussion of Cloud & GoGrid, demonstration of the GoGrid Portal & GoGrid Dedicated Server Deployments (30 minutes in length)
• Part Two – Question & Answer session from the audience and Additional Information (19 minutes in length)

Also included later on in this post is the stand-alone presentation (without audio, demo walk-through or question and answers).

GoGrid Feature Webinar – Part 1

GoGrid Webinar – February 2010 Product Update (PART 1) from GoGrid on Vimeo.

This is a webinar produced by GoGrid which walks through recent updates to GoGrid. The release was in February 2010 and the webinar covers:
- What is cloud computing
- What is GoGrid Hybrid Infrastructure Hosting
- New GoGrid Dedicated Servers
- New GoGrid List View
- Other changes
***This is Part 1 of a two part webinar***

GoGrid Feature Webinar – Part 2

GoGrid Webinar – February 2010 Product Update (PART 2) from GoGrid on Vimeo.

This is a webinar produced by GoGrid which walks through recent updates to GoGrid. The release was in February 2010 and the webinar covers:
- What is cloud computing
- What is GoGrid Hybrid Infrastructure Hosting
- New GoGrid Dedicated Servers
- New GoGrid List View
- Other changes
***This is Part 2 of a two part webinar***

Stand-Alone Presentation from Webinar

The following is the presentation that was used in the Webinar above.

If you have further questions about the GoGrid February 2010 Feature Update or about GoGrid in general, I recommend that you contact a GoGrid Sales Representative who can help you get started with GoGrid.

A couple of weeks ago we released a new version of GoGrid which included a variety of exciting enhancements and features. Most notable are:

• GoGrid Dedicated Servers
• List View of GoGrid Objects
• Edit F5 Load Balancers via the API
• New Login Page
• Self Service Support Links

More details about these features can be found on the following GoGrid blog post. For a quick overview of the new features in the form of a screencast, please watch the video below. I quickly cover many of the items listed above including:

• Walking through the new login page
• Deploying a GoGrid Dedicated Server
• Overview of the new GoGrid List View
• Dedicated Servers showing in the Jobs Tab
• Showing of Self-Service Links in the portal
• Editing Load Balancers using the GoGrid API

If you have more questions about these new GoGrid features, I recommend that you attend our webinar (on February 24, 2010) where you can get more information about this important release. Be sure to register for the webinar and come prepared with questions!