Re: [gentoo-user] Is anyone using Scaleway VM hosting?

[Stroller]

> On 11 Sep 2017, at 00:08, Alexey Eschenko <skobkin-ru@××.ru> wrote:
>
> I'm using Scaleway with Gentoo VM for two months. You can try to ask here but I don't know if I can answer to you properly.

Thanks. 

I signed up for an account there a day or two ago, and set up a VM running Gentoo.

Scaleway provide a Gentoo VM image x86_64-gentoo-latest-2016-04-06_16:15, so I added a user account and a handful of essential tools and started updating it to latest.

Having updated the VM to the current tree, I want to make an image of the system so that I have my Gentoo minimal 9-2017 VM that I can copy and deploy any time. 

The VM admin interface has sections for "volumes", "snapshots" and "images" - I assume they're all kinds of disc images, but I don't think I fully understand the difference.

I think:

• Volumes are active disc images, currently deployed in a VM.
• Snapshots are VM disc images, which are saved once the VM has been shutdown.
• Images are VM disk images which can be used as the basis for new VMs?

If my understanding is correct, I don't really see the difference between a "snapshot" and an "image" - is it merely that "images" are copied when they're deployed, whereas "snapshots" are resumed and any changes overwrite the old filesystem? Are there any other differences?

I'm used to running Linux on physical hardware, so I tend to think of disc images as being created if I boot from SystemRescueCD and `dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/usb-drive/old-pc.dd.img`. I can understand that, running a VM farm, one would probably want to have a bunch of disk images available to use - some of these I might label "my-gentoo-basic-master-2017" and "my-gentoo-webserver-master-2017", which I would mark as read-only, whilst others would be "my-webserver-www.something.com", and which would be current, active and read-write. I *think* this is the diasctintion being made between volumes, snapshots and images, but I lack confidence because this doesn't seem to be explained anywhere.

When I try to make a snapshot of a volume I get a message "Volume not snapshot - server must be stopped to snapshot". That sounds reasonable, but when I go to shutdown the VM and see this scary message - https://i.imgur.com/1E02DrP.png

I assume that "Archive" is the same as shutting down my PC - the contents of the VM are saved, and I can start it up again later. I don't understand the warning about the DSSD being "totally erased without any possible recovery" - surely the whole point is to make the VM inactive, but save it's current state, ready to start up again next time it's needed (like switching a regular PC on again). 

> Also I'd rather recommend to write to Scaleway support. They usually answers in one business day.

I don't feel confident in what I'm asking at the moment - I feel like these kind of questions ought to be covered in the first pages of a beginners' FAQ, but I don't immediately find them on Scaleway's site. I.E. I'm asking dumb questions, or I don't know the right questions to ask.

The Scaleway community support pages show some customer discontent (e.g. the "Your SMTP ports are blocked. Contact our support to unblock them" and "Abuse reports ignored?") and I can't help but wondering if I should have spent the extra €2 a month and gone for Linode. 

Final question: Scaleway advertise their servers as €2.99 a month / €0.006 per hour - are customers always billed on an hourly basis? I.E. if I have a have VM that I only spin up when I need it, an hour or two at a time, for a few hours a month, am I right in thinking I pay only pennies for that? It seems very convenient. Is this charging model common amongst VM hosting providers?

Thanks in advance for any pointers,

Stroller.