Blog from November, 2023

We are excited to announce the following features and improvements to the ITS Private Cloud, all designed to enhance your experience and streamline your computing needs:

Virtual Machine Restore Requests

Earlier this month, we released the virtual machine restore requests Introducing Virtual Machine Restore Requests: A Leap Forward in VM Recovery and an article about how to Request Virtual Machine Restore.

Command Line Interface v2023.11.1

Copy vmdk files from virtual machine to virtual machine with a couple of commands

# Get source VM disk path: file_name
vss-cli --columns=label,capacity_gib,file_name compute vm get 2311P-VM-A disk

# Submit copy request for the target
vss-cli compute vm set 2311P-VM-B disk cp \
--disk '{"capacity_gb": 100, "backing_vmdk": "[XXXX-NN] vm-name/vm-name_1.vmdk"}'

Virtual Machine Memory Reservation

Starting from December 1, 2023, any reserved memory on your instances will incur a charge of $175 per GiB per year. This change reflects our ongoing commitment to provide high-performance cloud services while also promoting efficient resource usage across our platform.

For example 2311P-VM-A has 16GB of memory and I would like to reserve 8GB, you can use the vss-cli as follows:

vss-cli compute vm set 2311P-VM-A memory reservation 8

To disable memory reservation use:

vss-cli compute vm set 2311P-VM-A memory reservation 0

Virtual Machine Network Adapter Management Improvements on the Portal

Connect and disconnect network adapters from the ITS Private Cloud Portal.

Virtual Machine Cost Calculator

This iteration includes new sections called “Additional Resources” and “Additional Services” .

In the Additional Services we are introducing UTORrecover Backups to the cost estimator. Once you click on it, a churn rate and protected data field will show up, along with a message with further details about how the cost of backups is calculated.

In the Additional Resources section you can add Memory Reservation to the cost estimator. Remember Memory Reservation has a cost of$175 per GiB per year.

We are excited to share an all-new feature designed to enhance the resilience and flexibility of your virtual machine running in the ITS Private Cloud: Virtual Machine Restore Requests. We understand that accidents happen, configurations change, and sometimes you just wish you could rewind the clock. Now, it is possible.

What’s new?

With the introduction of Virtual Machine Restore Requests, you will be able to restore your virtual machine from storage snapshots. This means, if there’s an error or unintended change to your VM, you can revert back to a specific point in time.

Pricing Transparency

Restore Requests are a pay per use service, you pay a one-time fee for each request. The cost of each request is determined by the virtual machine Provisioned Storage and Storage type:

1. Provisioned Storage GiB: Amount of storage provisioned to your VM (committed + uncommitted).

2. Storage Type:

To calculate a Virtual Machine Restore Request cost, simply multiply the VM provisioned storage by the storage tier price per GB:

VmRR = (Storage Provisioned in GiB) * (Restore Point Storage Rate per Tier)

For example, let's assume you want to recover two virtual machines: one with 300GB on HDD storage and one with 1.2TiB on SSD storage:

The one-time fee for each request is calculated as follows:

VM Restore request 1: 300GiB * $0.30 = $90.00

VM Restore request 2: 1228.8GiB * 0.60 = $737.28

Specifications

While we are thrilled to roll out this feature, there are a few things to consider:

• These virtual machine restore points are not crash consistent. This means while they are perfect for most rollback situations but they might not capture every last in-flight transaction.

• Restore points will be made available on a best-effort basis, with up to 12 snapshots per day for 20 days.

How to access?

Starting today, the Restore Point Requests are available via:

1. ITS Private Cloud Portal: Request Virtual Machine Restore

2. Command Line Interface aka vss-cli: Request Virtual Machine Restore Available from version v2023.10.0.

3. Python SDK aka pvvss: Available from version v2023.10.0.