Cloudmersive Private Cloud Best Practices for Google Cloud Platform

Overview

Cloudmersive Private Cloud natively supports Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Follow these best practices to facillitate a great installation experience.

General Approach

In general, follow the instructions in the Cloudmersive management portal under Private Cloud Deployment. Extend those instructions with these best practices.

Choosing the Right Compute Engine Machine Configuration

When creating your Compute Engine instance, we recommend a n1-standard-4 or equivalent. Be sure that your Compute Engine instance has at least 15 GB of RAM. When choosing Boot Disk, be sure to choose Windows Server 2016 Datacenter (Server with Desktop Experience x64). Be sure to set the Boot Disk Size to 200 GB or larger. For Boot Disk Type, SSD is recommended but not required. Under Firewall click the box "Allow HTTP Traffic". For the installation, connect to the instance over Remote Desktop (RDP). Ensure that the instance has outbound connectivity as described in the instructions. We strongly recommend setting all IP addresses as static. Reserve a static external IP address, and reserve a static Internal IP Address (see GCP documentation) in the Google Cloud Platform Console. NOTE: GCP can change IP addresses on restart if they are not set as static. After installing pre-requisites and restarting, be sure to double-check the internal and external IPs and update them in the Configure Node page if needed.

Before Installation (Required)

After provisioning your Compute Engine instances but prior to running the installation, navigate to each node in your Cloudmersive Private Cloud installation in the management portal under Private Cloud Deployment and click on Configure Node. Under External Node Address, copy and paste the External IP from the VM instance details page in the Google Cloud Platform Console. Under Internal Node Address, copy and paste the Primary internal IP from the VM instance details page in Google Cloud Platform Console. If you are using an outbound proxy (not common in GCP), check the box for Enable Proxy Server for Outbound Traffic and specify the proxy server. Click Save Changes.

We also recommend disabling automatic Windows Update restarts in Windows Server 2016.

After Installation

If you are installing Cloudmersive Private Cloud in high availability mode, you will want to configure a Load Balancer to balance traffic across the nodes. Create a load balancer under Load Balancing in Google Cloud Platform and set the endpoints to the HTTP 80 (or HTTPS 443 if you configured it) port on each of the nodes that you installed. Use the public endpoint of the load balancer as the BasePath for all of the API clients.