Create and manage regional disks
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Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability and regional Persistent Disk
are storage options that let you implement high availability (HA) services in
Compute Engine. Regional Persistent Disk and Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability synchronously replicate
data between two zones in the same region and ensure HA for disk data for up
to one zonal failure. The regional disk can be a boot disk or
a non-boot disk.
You can also allow different
instances to concurrently access a Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability disk by setting the disk access
mode. Regional disks can only be attached to instances in the same zones as the
disk's replicas. For more information, see
Share a disk between instances.
This document explains how to do the following tasks for regional disks:
If using multi-writer mode for Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability disks, review the requirements and
limitations in Share disks between instances.
If you haven't already, set up authentication.
Authentication verifies your identity for access to Google Cloud services and APIs. To run
code or samples from a local development environment, you can authenticate to
Compute Engine by selecting one of the following options:
Select the tab for how you plan to use the samples on this page:
Console
When you use the Google Cloud console to access Google Cloud services and
APIs, you don't need to set up authentication.
gcloud
Install the Google Cloud CLI.
After installation,
initialize the Google Cloud CLI by running the following command:
To use the Terraform samples on this page in a local development environment, install and
initialize the gcloud CLI, and then set up Application Default Credentials with
your user credentials.
These predefined roles contain
the permissions required to create a regional disk. To see the exact permissions that are
required, expand the Required permissions section:
Required permissions
The following permissions are required to create a regional disk:
compute.disks.create
compute.instances.attachDisk
compute.disks.use
Create a snapshot of a disk:
compute.disks.createSnapshot
You can't create a regional Persistent Disk from an OS image, or from a disk that was created
from an OS image.
You can't create a regional disk by cloning a Hyperdisk ML or Hyperdisk Throughput disk. You must create a snapshot
of the source disk and then create a Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability disk from the snapshot. For more information, see
Change a zonal disk to a
Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability disk.
When using read-only mode, you can attach a regional Balanced Persistent Disk to a maximum of 10
VM instances.
The minimum size of a regional Standard Persistent Disk is 200 GiB.
You can only increase the size of a
regional Persistent Disk or
Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability volume; you can't decrease its size.
You can't use a Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability volume that's in multi-writer mode as a boot disk.
If you create a replicated disk by cloning a zonal disk, then the two zonal replicas
aren't fully in sync at the time of creation. After creation, you can use the regional disk
clone within 3 minutes, on average. However, you might need to wait for tens of minutes
before the disk reaches a fully replicated state and the
recovery point objective (RPO) is close to zero. Learn how to
check if your replicated disk is fully replicated.
About using a regional disk as a boot disk for an instance
You can attach a
regional Persistent Disk or Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability disk as a boot disk for
stateful workloads that are provisioned ahead of time, before you provision a
production workload. Regional boot disks are not intended for hot standbys,
because you can't simultaneously attach one boot disk to two instances.
In a high availability setup, if the boot device is a regional disk,
Google recommends that you don't pre-create and start the standby instance.
Instead, at the failover stage, attach the existing regional disk when you
create the standby instance by using the forceAttach option.
You can't create a regional disk from an OS image.
To use a regional disk as the boot disk for an instance, use one of the following
methods.
If you need to failover a regional boot disk to a running standby instance in
the replica zone, then use the steps described in
Attach a regional boot disk to an instance.
Size limits and reference names
The size you specify for a regional disk must be within the ranges listed in
following table.
If you create a regional disk with the Google Cloud CLI,
REST, or the Cloud Client Libraries for Compute Engine,
indicate the disk type to create by providing the
value in the Reference name column in the following table.
Disk type
Reference name
Minimum size
Maximum size
Default size
Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability
hyperdisk-balanced-high-availability
4 GiB
64 TiB
100 GiB
Balanced Persistent Disk
pd-balanced
Zonal: 10 GiB Regional: 10 GiB
64 TiB
100 GiB
Performance (SSD) Persistent Disk
pd-ssd
Zonal: 10 GiB Regional: 10 GiB
64 TiB
100 GiB
Standard Persistent Disk
pd-standard
Zonal: 10 GiB Regional: 200 GiB
64 TiB
500 GiB
Create a regional disk
Create a
regional Persistent Disk or Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability volume. The disk
must be in the same region as the compute instance that you plan to attach it
to.
If you create a Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability volume, you can also allow different instances
to concurrently access the disk by setting the disk access mode. For
more information, see Share a disk between instances.
For regional Persistent Disk, if you create a disk in the Google Cloud console,
the default disk type
is pd-balanced. If you create a disk using the gcloud CLI or
REST, the default disk type is pd-standard.
For disks that are not boot disks, after you create a
regional Persistent Disk or Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability volume, you can attach it
to an instance. The instance must be in the same region as the disk.
To attach a Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability disk to multiple instances, repeat the procedure in this
section for each instance. You can attach Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability disks only in read-write
mode.
For non-boot disks, after you create and attach a blank regional disk to a
instance, you must format and mount the disk,
so that the operating system can use the available storage space.
When setting up a highly available compute instance, you can create the
primary instance with a new regional boot disk. When you create an instance at the same time as its regional boot disk,
you must create the boot disk from a snapshot.
To create a new regional disk from an existing zonal disk instead, you must
first Change the zonal disk to a regional disk,
and then create the instance with the new regional disk.
To create an instance with a new, regional, boot disk, use one of the
following methods.
Create a new instance with additional regional disks
When creating an instance, you can optionally include
regional Persistent Disk or
Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability volumes as additional disks.
To create and attach a
regional Persistent Disk or
Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability volume to an instance during instance creation, see either of the
following:
Replace the boot disk of an existing instance with a regional boot disk.
Failover a regional boot disk to a hot standby instance that is running in the
backup zone. You do this by attaching the regional disk to the instance as the
boot disk.
These steps assume that the regional disk and instance already exist.
If instances with regional disks require additional storage
space, you can resize the disks. You can resize disks at
any time, regardless of whether the disk is attached to a running instance. If
you need to separate your data into unique volumes,
create multiple secondary disks for the instance. For
Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability you can also increase the IOPS and throughput limits for the disk.
The command for resizing a regional disk is very similar to that for
resizing a zonal disk. However, you must specify a region instead of
a zone for the disk location.
You can only increase, and not decrease, the size of a disk. To decrease the
disk size, you must create a new disk with a smaller size. Until you delete the
original, larger disk, you are charged for both disks.
For instructions on how to modify a regional disk, see the following:
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