This article includes instructions to create a boot volume from the Nectar Dashboard or to create a boot volume using CLI commands.
Why boot from volume?
Booting your Virtual Machine (VM) instance from a volume can have some benefits; particularly that you can customise the size of the VM's root disk (think of this like the main hard drive in your computer). Depending on your workload, you may find it more flexible to manage your Volume and instance separately.
In general, the simplest way to launch a VM instance on the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud is to choose an Operating System (OS) Image (e.g. Ubuntu) and boot directly from it. The Flavor of the instance includes the size of the root disk, and this is typically 30 GB. This is sufficient for many workloads, but sometimes the disk size can become a limitation. Utilising boot from volume allows you create a Volume from the OS Image of any size you choose, and then your VM instance will use the Volume as the main hard drive for the cloud computer.
There are also scenarios where separating the main hard drive (OS disk) from the VM instance is beneficial. This is most obvious when working with the Reservation Service. The time-limited nature of the reservation service means that your VM instance will be killed once the reservation expires. Managing the VM instance's boot disk separately with boot from volume means that the volume is preserved after the Reservation System has killed the VM instance, allowing you to simply boot again with the existing volume, and saving you any potential repeat provisioning.
Creating a boot volume from the Dashboard
The Nectar Dashboard supports boot from volume with a handy option in the Source tab of the Launch Instance window.
When choosing your desired image, select Yes under the Create New Volume header.
Creating a boot volume using the CLI
In this example, we will create a 50 GB bootable volume from the latest Nectar Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble) image in the melbourne-qh2 Availability Zone. This uses the --boot-from-volume shortcut method.
$ openstack server create \
--availability-zone melbourne-qh2 \
--flavor m3.small \
--image 'NeCTAR Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble) amd64' \
--boot-from-volume 50 \
--key-name andy \
--security-group ssh \
my-server
If you already have an existing Volume you want to boot a new VM instance from, then you can use the --volume option instead of using the --boot-from-volume and --image options.
If you want to create the Volume yourself, then you can use the following command line:
$ openstack volume create \
--bootable \
--availability-zone melbourne-qh2 \
--image 'NeCTAR Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble) amd64' \
--size 50 \
my-ubuntu-volume
+---------------------+--------------------------------------+
| Field | Value |
+---------------------+--------------------------------------+
| attachments | [] |
| availability_zone | melbourne-qh2 |
| bootable | false |
| consistencygroup_id | None |
| created_at | 2024-09-23T01:28:46.951099 |
| description | None |
| encrypted | False |
| id | f3489929-60fb-4aca-a20b-122bf60cfec5 |
| multiattach | False |
| name | my-ubuntu-volume |
| properties | |
| replication_status | None |
| size | 50 |
| snapshot_id | None |
| source_volid | None |
| status | creating |
| type | standard |
| updated_at | None |
| user_id | 4b5fe43d1c324775b8e8ecdf7db492ad |
+---------------------+--------------------------------------+
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