Create an instance

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This page shows you how to create a Filestore instance by using either the Google Cloud console or the gcloud CLI.

Instructions for creating an instance

gcloud filestore instances create INSTANCE_ID \
    [--project=PROJECT_ID] \
    [--location=LOCATION] \
    [--description=DESCRIPTION] \
    [--performance=PERFORMANCE] \
    --tier=TIER \
    --file-share=name="FILE_SHARE_NAME",capacity=FILE_SHARE_SIZE \
    --network=name="VPC-NETWORK",[connect-mode=CONNECT_MODE],[reserved-ip-range="RESERVED_IP_ADDRESS"] \
    [--labels=KEY=VALUE,[KEY=VALUE,…]] \
    [--kms-key=KMS_KEY] \
    [--deletion-protection] \
    [--deletion-protection-reason="PROTECTION_REASON"]

gcloud filestore instances create render1 \
  --project=myproject \
  --region=us-central1 \
  --tier=REGIONAL \
  --performance=max-iops-per-tb=17000 \
  --network=name="default",reserved-ip-range="10.0.7.0/29" \
  --flags-file=nfs-export-options.json \
  --deletion-protection \
  --deletion-protection-reason="All genomics data must adhere to current
  organization policies."

 {
"--file-share":
  {
    "capacity": "2048",
    "name": "my_vol",
    "nfs-export-options": [
      {
        "access-mode": "READ_WRITE",
        "ip-ranges": [
          "10.0.0.0/29",
          "10.2.0.0/29"
        ],
        "squash-mode": "ROOT_SQUASH",
        "anon_uid": 1003,
        "anon_gid": 1003
      },
      {
        "access-mode": "READ_ONLY",
        "ip-ranges": [
          "192.168.0.0/26"
        ],
        "squash-mode": "NO_ROOT_SQUASH"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Understand instances and shares

A Filestore instance represents physical storage capacity.

A share represents an allocated portion of that storage with an individual, unique access point.

All service tiers offer storage options with a 1:1 share–to–instance ratio. Alternatively, Filestore multishares for GKE, available for enterprise-tier instances only, offers access to multiple shares on a single instance.

Instance names, or instance IDs, are used by administrators to manage instances. File share names are used by clients to connect to the shares exported from those instances.

Name your instance

The name of your Filestore instance, or instance ID, is used to identify the instance and is used in gcloud commands. Instance IDs must comply with the <label> element of RFC 1035. Specifically, they must:

• Be between 1-63 characters long.
• Begin with a lowercase letter.
• Consist of dashes, lowercase letters, or digits.
• End with lowercase letters or digits.

The instance ID must be unique in the Google Cloud project and zone where it's located. Once an instance is created, its instance ID cannot be changed.

Configure service tier

Select the service tier that best suits your needs. Once an instance is created, its service tier cannot be changed. The following table summarizes capabilities available by service tier:

^* Regional and Zonal service tiers allow defining custom performance settings. For details, see custom performance.

Create operations for zonal, regional, and enterprise instances can take anywhere between 15 minutes and one hour to complete, depending on instance size.

Filestore quota is consumed when instance creation starts but you are not billed for the instance during this time.

For a more detailed description of capabilities available by service tier, see Service tiers.

Allocate capacity

Allocate capacity to the amount you need when you create the instance. As you approach your capacity limit, you can scale up the capacity as needed without affecting runtime. To learn about how you can monitor the capacity of your instances, see Monitoring instances.

In the gcloud CLI, you can specify the capacity in whole numbers using either GiB or TiB. The default unit is GiB.

The following table shows the instance sizes available for each tier:

The size of instances can be any whole gibibyte value or its tebibyte equivalent that's between the minimum and maximum instance size and is divisible by its incremental step size. For example, valid sizes for zonal-tier instances with a higher capacity range include 10 TiB, 12.5 TiB, and 15 TiB.

Once created, basic HDD and basic SSD instances can only scale up in size. All other service tiers can scale up or down in capacity. For more information, see Edit instances and Scale capacity.

Total capacity quota

Every project is allocated a separate capacity quota, defined by region and service tier. Quota limits vary by service tier.

Once you have reached your quota limit, you won't be able to create more Filestore instances or increase the capacity of your existing instances. To see your available quota, go to the Quotas page in the Google Cloud console:

Go to the Quotas page

For information on requesting more quota, see Requesting quota increases.

Configure performance

Instance performance depends on the service tier you choose.

Regional and zonal tiers

• For regional and zonal tiers you can set an IOPS per TiB ratio which allows instance IOPS to scale with capacity, or a constant IOPS value that doesn't scale with capacity but can be adjusted at any time if the capacity changes. For details on limits, see custom performance limits. If you don't set up custom performance, performance scales linearly with capacity according to a predefined ratio. For details, see performance.

Basic SSD and basic HDD tiers

• For basic SSD tiers the number of IOPS is constant and doesn't change when you change capacity settings.
• For basic HDD tiers the performance limits change depending if the capacity falls within the range of 1 TiB to 10 TiB or from 10 TiB to 63.9 TiB.

For additional information on performance limits and settings, see performance.

Specify IOPS per TiB ratio

Enabling custom performance lets you to specify the ratio in the IOPS per TiB field where the performance scales based on the capacity.

If you want to use fixed IOPS, clear the Scale performance with capacity checkbox.

Assuming you have specified the following initial performance values:

• Capacity: 1 TiB
• IOPS per TiB: 6,000
• Performance (when the Scale performance with capacity checkbox is selected): 6,000 IOPS

The following examples show how performance scales based on changed settings:

• Increasing IOPS per TiB to 7,000 adjusts Performance to 7,000 IOPS.
• Increasing Capacity to 2 TiB adjusts Performance to 14,000 IOPS.
• Decreasing Performance to 8,000 IOPS adjusts IOPS per TiB to 4,000.

Specify fixed number of IOPS

If you clear the Scale performance with capacity checkbox, the Performance field specifies the number of IOPS you want to use. This number must be within the performance range and a multiple of 1,000.

Setting a fixed number of IOPS independently of capacity allows performance tuning. However, this option prevents automatic performance scaling with capacity changes. Changing capacity might require adjusting the performance value, and the other way around.

For example, you specified the following values:

• Capacity: 4 TiB
• Performance 40,000 IOPS

At this point, you can increase the performance up to 68,000 IOPS, which is the limit for 4 TiB of capacity. You want to increase performance to 70,000 IOPS which is beyond the performance range for the capacity of 4 TiB. To maintain compatibility, you must increase the capacity to 4.25 TiB or higher to fall within the performance range.

Select a location

Location refers to the Region and Zone where the Filestore instance is located. For the best performance and to avoid cross-regional networking charges, ensure that the Filestore instance is located in the same region as the Compute Engine VMs that need to access them.

For more information about regions and zones, see Geography and regions.

Select the VPC network

The network that you select to use with Filestore can be either a standard VPC network or a Shared VPC network. In both cases, the network that you choose must have enough available IP resources to dedicate to the Filestore instance, otherwise the instance fails to create.

Clients must be on the same network as the Filestore instance to access the files stored on that instance. Once an instance is created, this network selection cannot be changed.

Shared VPC network

Before you can create an instance on a Shared VPC network in a service project, the network administrator must first enable private services access for the Shared VPC network. If you are creating the instance in the host project, private services access is not required.

Shared VPC networks are displayed in the Google Cloud console in the format:

projects/HOST_PROJECT_ID/global/networks/SHARED_VPC_NAME

For detailed procedures, see Creating an instance on a Shared VPC network.

NFS file locking

If the applications you plan to use with this Filestore instance require NFS file locking, and you are choosing either of the following, you may need to open up the ports used by Filestore in the network you choose:

• A VPC network other than the default network.
• The default VPC network with changed firewall rules.

For more information, see Configuring firewall rules.

Configure the file share

A file share is the directory on a Filestore instance where all shared files are stored. It is also the thing that you mount or map to on the client VM.

The name of the file share must comply with the following:

• Be between 1-32 characters long for zonal, regional, and enterprise tiers, and 1-16 characters long for basic tiers.
• Begin with a letter.
• Consist of uppercase or lowercase letters, numbers, and underscores.
• End with a letter or number.

Configure IP-based access control

By default, a Filestore instance grants root level read and write access to all clients, including Compute Engine VMs and GKE clusters, that share the same Google Cloud project and VPC network. If you want to restrict access, you can do so by creating rules that grant specific access levels to clients based on their IP address. Once the rules are added, all IP addresses and ranges that are not specified in a rule are revoked access. Zonal, regional, and enterprise instances support configuration settings for overlapping IP address ranges. For more information, see Overlapping permissions.

The following table describes the privileges of each access level. These access levels are only used in the Google Cloud console. In the gcloud CLI and the API, you must specify the rule configurations directly.

root-squash maps all requests from uid 0 and gid 0 to anon_uid and anon_gid, respectively. This configuration removes root level access from clients that attempt to access the file share as a root user.

When creating IP-based access rules:

• You must specify an internal IP address or range and the access level granted.
• At least one rule must grant admin access at the time of instance creation. This rule can be removed once the instance is created.
• Zonal, regional, and enterprise instances support configuration settings for overlapping IP address ranges. Basic-tier instances are not supported. For more information, see Overlapping permissions.

In the Google Cloud console, you can create up to 4 different rules (admin, admin-viewer, editor, viewer) involving up to 64 different IP addresses or ranges.

In the gcloud CLI, you can configure up to 64 different IP addresses or CIDR blocks per Filestore instance across a maximum of 10 different rules. A rule is defined as the combination of the access-mode, squash-mode, and anon_uid/anon_gid configurations. The anon_uid and anon_gid fields have default values of 65534 and can only be configured through the API and the gcloud CLI.

Example

Here's an example of three different IP-based access rules:

• access-mode=READ_ONLY, squash-mode=ROOT_SQUASH, anon_uid=10000.
• access-mode=READ_WRITE, squash-mode=ROOT_SQUASH, anon_gid=150.
• access-mode=READ_WRITE, squash-mode=NO_ROOT_SQUASH.

To create IP-based access control rules using the gcloud CLI, use the --flags-file flag with the instances create or instances update commands and point it to a JSON configuration file. For example, if the JSON configuration file is named nfs-export-options.json, the flag would be:

--flags-file=nfs-export-options.json

Example JSON configuration file:

   {
  "--file-share":
    {
      "capacity": "2048",
      "name": "my_vol",
      "nfs-export-options": [
        {
          "access-mode": "READ_WRITE",
          "ip-ranges": [
            "10.0.0.0/29",
            "10.2.0.0/29"
          ],
          "squash-mode": "ROOT_SQUASH",
          "anon_uid": 1003,
          "anon_gid": 1003
        },
         {
          "access-mode": "READ_ONLY",
          "ip-ranges": [
            "192.168.0.0/26"
          ],
          "squash-mode": "NO_ROOT_SQUASH"
        }
      ]
    }
}

• ip-ranges is the IP address or range to grant access to. You can specify multiple IP addresses or ranges by separating them with a comma. Only zonal, regional, and enterprise instances support configuration settings for overlapping IP address ranges. For more information, see Overlapping permissions.
• access-mode is the access level to grant to the clients whose IP address falls within ip-range. It can have the values of READ_WRITE or READ_ONLY. The default value is READ_WRITE.
• squash-mode can have the values ROOT_SQUASH or NO_ROOT_SQUASH. ROOT_SQUASH removes root level access to the clients whose IP address falls within ip-range, while NO_ROOT_SQUASH enables root access. The default value is NO_ROOT_SQUASH.
• anon_uid is the user ID value that you want to map to anon_uid. The default value is 65534.
• anon_gid is the group ID value that you want to map to anon_gid. The default value is 65534.

Clients on non-RFC 1918 ranges

If you plan to connect non-RFC 1918 clients to your Filestore instance, you must explicitly grant them access to the Filestore instance using IP-based access control.

Optional fields

The following sections describe optional fields.

Add an instance description

An instance description lets you write descriptions, notes, or instructions for yourself and other users. For example, you can include information about:

• The types of files stored in the instance.
• Who has access to the instance.
• Instructions for how to get access to the instance.
• What the instance is used for.

Instance descriptions are limited to 2048 characters in length. There are no restrictions on the characters that are allowed. Once a Filestore instance is created, you can update its instance description anytime as needed. For information on updating instance descriptions, see Editing instances.

Add labels

Labels are key-value pairs that you can use to group related instances and store metadata about an instance. You can add, delete, or modify labels anytime. For more information, see Managing labels.

Configure a reserved IP address range

Each Filestore instance must have an IP address range associated with it. Both RFC 1918 and non-RFC 1918 IP address ranges (GA) are supported.

Once specified, an instance's IP address range is immutable.

Users are encouraged to let Filestore automatically determine a free IP address range and assign it to the instance. When selecting your own range, consider the following Filestore IP resource requirements:

• Must use CIDR notation.

• Must be a valid VPC subnet range.

• Basic instances require a block size of 29. For example, 10.123.123.0/29.

• Zonal, regional, and enterprise instances require a block size of 26. For example, 172.16.123.0/26.

• The IP address range must not overlap with the following:

  • Existing subnets in the VPC network that the Filestore instance uses.

  • Existing subnets in a VPC network that's peered with the one that the Filestore instance uses. For details, see Overlapping subnets at time of peering.

  • IP address ranges assigned to any other existing Filestore instances in that network.

  • The 172.17.0.0/16 address range is reserved for internal Filestore components. As a result, the following limitations apply:

    • Clients in this range can't be connected to Filestore instances.

    • Filestore instances can't be created within this IP range. For more information, see Known issues.

• There must be at least one VPC Network Peering or private services access connections per VPC.

You can see the IP address ranges for the subnets of your network by going to the VPC networks page in the Google Cloud console:

Go to the VPC networks page

You can get the reserved IP address range for any Filestore instance on the Filestore instances page in the Google Cloud console:

Go to the Filestore instances page

If you want to use private services access and specify a reserved IP address range, you must specify the name of an allocated address range for the connection. If you don't specify a range name, Filestore automatically uses any of the allocated ranges associated with the private services access connection.

Use a customer-managed encryption key

By default, Google Cloud automatically encrypts data when it is at rest using encryption keys managed by Google. If you need more control over the keys that protect your data, you can use customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) for Filestore. For details, see Encrypt data with customer-managed encryption keys.

Enable deletion protection

Set the instance's deletion protection setting. By default, this setting is disabled. For more information, see Deletion protection.

Add a deletion protection setting description

Add a description of the justification behind the deletion protection setting you chose. For more information, see Deletion protection.

What's next

• Learn how to configure an instance for use with the NFSv4.1 protocol.
• Learn how to connect instances to clients:
  • Mount the Filestore file share on a Compute Engine VM instance.
  • Access Filestore instances with the Filestore CSI driver.
  • Use Filestore instances as external datastores for VMware ESXi hosts in VMware Engine.
  • Mount file shares on remote clients.
  • Mount a Filestore instance to a Cloud Run service to share data between containers and services.
• See how to retrieve instance details, such as the instance's IP address, so that you can access the Filestore file share from clients.
• Troubleshoot instance creation issues related to Filestore.
• Learn more about Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks and subnets.
• Learn more about networking and IP resource requirements for Filestore.