View machine type

This document describes the predefined machine types available to configure your virtual machine (VM) instance in Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped environments.

When you create a VM workload in (GDC), you can select the VirtualMachineType template, which determines the resources allocated to that VM. GDC has some predefined VirtualMachineType templates to choose from during your VM workload creation. Use either the GDC console or command-line interface (CLI) to view all available VirtualMachineType templates.

This document is for developers in platform administrator or application operator groups that create and configure VM instances. For more information, see Audiences for GDC air-gapped documentation.

Before you begin

Before continuing, ensure that you have the following:

  • The gdcloud CLI downloaded, installed, and configured. All CLI commands for GDC use the gdcloud or kubectl CLI, and require an operating system (OS) environment.
  • Use the path to the kubeconfig file of the Management API server to replace MANAGEMENT_API_SERVER in these instructions.

About VirtualMachineType

GDC defines a VirtualMachineType resource with some parameters for a VM, which include CPU, memory, and GPU. GDC has various VirtualMachineType templates for different purposes. You can also use predefined VirtualMachineType templates that are differentiated by memory configurations, such as standard, highmem, and highcpu.

N machine series

You can use N-series machines for general-purpose VM workloads, for example, high performance computing (HPC) and CPU-bound tasks.

The following is a list of all Distributed Cloud predefined n-series VirtualMachineType machines:

Name vCPUs Memory GPU
n2-standard-2-gdc 2 8G N/A
n2-standard-4-gdc 4 16G N/A
n2-standard-8-gdc 8 32G N/A
n2-standard-16-gdc 16 64G N/A
n2-standard-32-gdc 32 128G N/A
n2-highcpu-8-gdc 8 8G N/A
n2-highmem-2-gdc 2 16G N/A
n2-highmem-4-gdc 4 32G N/A
n2-highmem-8-gdc 8 64G N/A
n2-highmem-16-gdc 16 128G N/A
n2-highmem-32-gdc 32 256G N/A
n3-standard-2-gdc 2 8G N/A
n3-standard-4-gdc 4 16G N/A
n3-standard-8-gdc 8 32G N/A
n3-standard-16-gdc 16 64G N/A
n3-standard-32-gdc 32 128G N/A
n3-standard-64-gdc 64 256G N/A
n3-standard-80-gdc 80 320G N/A
n4-highmem-4-gdc 4 32G N/A
n4-highmem-8-gdc 8 64G N/A
n4-highmem-16-gdc 16 128G N/A
n4-highmem-32-gdc 32 256G N/A
n4-highmem-48-gdc 48 384G N/A
n4-highmem-64-gdc 64 512G N/A
n4-highmem-80-gdc 80 640G N/A

A machine series

A-series machines are "accelerator-optimized" machines that use NVIDIA GPUs. You can use these machine types to run GPU-accelerated workloads, for example, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

The following is a list of all Distributed Cloud predefined A-series VirtualMachineType machines:

Name vCPUs Memory GPU
a2-highgpu-1g-gdc 12 85G 1x A100 40GB
a2-ultragpu-1g-gdc 12 170G 1x A100 80GB
a2-ultragpu-2g-gdc 24 340G 2x A100 80GB
a3-highgpu-1g-gdc 28 240G 1x H100 94GB
a3-highgpu-2g-gdc 56 480G 2x H100 94GB
a3-highgpu-4g-gdc 112 960G 4x H100 94GB
a3-ultragpu-8g-gdc 224 1792G 8x H200 141GB
a4-ultragpu-8g-gdc 224 3584G 8x B300

To use an A-series machine type for your VM instance, see Create and start a VM instance with NVIDIA GPUs.

List all predefined VirtualMachineType machines

To view all available VirtualMachineType templates in your environment, you can either check the Machine type list within the GDC console, or use either one of the following kubectl or gdcloud CLI commands:

Console

  1. Sign in to the GDC console.
  2. In the navigation menu, click Virtual Machines > Instances > Create Instance.
  3. On the Basics page, go to the Machine type section. Make sure that the General-purpose toggle button is selected.
  4. Review the list of available predefined machine types.

gdcloud 

gdcloud compute machine-types list

kubectl 

kubectl --kubeconfig MANAGEMENT_API_SERVER \
  -n vm-system \
  get virtualmachinetypes.virtualmachine.gdc.goog
  • Replace MANAGEMENT_API_SERVER with the kubeconfig file for the Management API server.

View a single VirtualMachineType

To view a specific VirtualMachineType, you can use the kubectl CLI:

kubectl 

kubectl --kubeconfig MANAGEMENT_API_SERVER \
  -n vm-system \
  get virtualmachinetypes.virtualmachine.gdc.goog VMType_NAME \
  -o yaml

Replace the following:

  • MANAGEMENT_API_SERVER with the kubeconfig file for the Management API server.
  • VMType_NAME with the name of the VirtualMachineType you want to query.

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