Google Makes It Easy To Manage A Large Fleet Of Compute Engine VMs

Google announced Virtual Machine ManagerA suite of tools that can be used to manage the operating systems of large virtual machine (VM) fleets running Windows and Linux on Google Compute Engine.

For customers running hundreds of virtual machines in the cloud, managing the fleet becomes difficult. Administrators need to gain insight into the inventory of virtual machines to understand which operating system they are running, version, instance type, list of installed packages, and more. They should be able to plan to patch the operating system with minimal downtime. Finally, administrators must be able to maintain consistent configuration across the fleet and automatically fix problems that make virtual machines incompatible.

Virtual Machine Manager is designed to address these common challenges that managers often face when managing a large fleet of virtual machines on Google Compute Engine (GCE).

New and existing GCE instances can take advantage of VM Manager when the metadata flag is enabled. Customers can use the Cloud Console, command line tool, or API to open the setting. This step will force the virtual machine to download, install, and start the VM Manager agent.

Once the agent is installed in the virtual machine, customers can perform the following actions on a fleet of Linux or Windows virtual machines running on their projects.

Inventory management

This component of VM Manager allows administrators to collect operating system and package information. Based on the details, they can determine which VMs are running a specific version of an OS system, view packages installed in a VM, create a list of available package updates for each VM, and identify missing packages, updates, or patches for a VM. .

Configuration management

This service allows customers to deploy, query and maintain consistent configurations of Linux and Windows VMs. It performs large-scale auto-improvement features to keep the fleet compatible. Guest policies running on virtual machines keep software configuration consistent.

Patch Management

This service aims to keep machines updated against vulnerabilities by allowing administrators to automatically apply operating system patches, retrieve patch compliance data from the operating system, and automate the installation of OS patches across virtual machines from a central location. The service is responsible for both announcing compliance and distributing patches.

It took Google a long time to add fleet management capabilities to its Infrastructure as a Service offering, Compute Engine. Amazon and Microsoft offer powerful management tools that support cloud-based VMs, physical servers, and virtual machines running in on-premises environments.

Announced in 2017 AWS Systems Manager The (ASM) service allows customers to centralize operational data from multiple AWS services and automate tasks across various cloud resources. It is optimized to manage Windows and Linux machines running on EC2 or an on-premises data center from a single unified experience. ASM’s Session Manager component is a popular tool used by customers to access remote servers without opening additional ports or running a host.

Azure customers trust Azure Policy To manage the compatibility and desired state of configuration in Azure VMs. With Azure Arc, Microsoft expanded this functionality to Linux and Windows servers running on-premises environments and other public clouds.

Google can extend VM Manager to support some features found in AWS Systems Manager and Azure Policy.