Set up GCP for ThoughtSpot

After you’ve determined your configuration options, set up your virtual machines (VMs). The ThoughtSpot base image for booting the VMs and some other aspects of system setup will be shared with you on GCP by ThoughtSpot.

About the ThoughtSpot and Google Cloud Platform

ThoughtSpot uses a custom image to populate VMs on GCP. The base image is a Centos derived image, which will be available to you in your Google Compute Engine project for Boot disk options under Custom Images.

Ask your ThoughtSpot liaison for access to this image. We will need the Google account/email ID of the individual who will be logged into your organization’s GCP console. We will share ThoughtSpot’s GCP project with them so they can use the contained boot disk image for creating ThoughtSpot VMs.

Overview

Before you can create a ThoughtSpot cluster, you need to provision VMs. We’ll do this on Google Compute Engine, the GCP platform for creating and running VMs.

In a nutshell, the required configuration ThoughtSpot is:

• 64 vCPU
• 416 GB RAM
• 250GB SSD for the boot disk, provisioned with a ThoughtSpot base image
• 2 1TB SSD for data

The following topics walk you through this process.

Create an instance

1. Log in to the Google Cloud Console.

2. Go to the Compute Engine dashboard, and select the associated ThoughtSpot project.

   

3. Select VM instances on the left panel and click CREATE INSTANCE.

4. Provide a name for the image, choose a region, choose number of CPUs (e.g., 8 vCPUs for a cluster), and click Customize to further configure CPUs and memory.

   

5. For Machine type set the following configuration:

   Setting	Value
   Cores	64 vCPU
   Memory	416 GB
   Extend memory	Enabled (checkmark)
   CPU platform	Automatic (or select one of the preferred CPU platforms, Intel Skylake or Intel Broadwell, if available)

   

   

6. Configure the Boot disk.

   a. Scroll down to the find the Boot disk section and click Change.

   

   b. Click Custom Images on the tabs at the top, select a ThoughtSpot base image and configure the boot disk as follows:

   Setting	Value
   Image	ThoughtSpot
   Boot disk type	Standard persistent disk
   Size (GB)	250

   

   Note: ThoughtSpot updates these base images with patches and enhancements. If more than one image is available, the newest one is always at the top of the list. Both will work, but we recommend taking the newer image as it likely includes security or other types of patches.

   c. Click Select to save the boot disk configuration.

7. Back on the main configuration page, click to expand the advanced configuration options (Management, security, disks, networking, sole tenancy).

   

8. Attach 2 1TB SSD drives. These drives will be used for the data storage.

   a. Click the Disks tab, and click Add new disk.

   

   b. Configure the following settings for each disk.

   Setting	Value
   Type	SSD persistent disk
   Source type	Blank disk
   Size (GB)	1024

   

   

9. Customize the network settings as needed, preferably use your default VPC settings.

10. Repeat these steps to create the necessary number of such VMs.

Prepare the VMs (ThoughtSpot Systems Reliability Team)

Before we can install a ThoughtSpot cluster, an administrator must log in to each VM via SSH as user “admin” and complete the following preparation steps:

1. Run sudo /usr/local/scaligent/bin/prepare_disks.sh on every machine.
2. Configure each VM based on the site-survey.

Launch the cluster

Upload the TS tarball to one of the machines and proceed with the normal cluster creation process, using tscli cluster create.

Additional resources

As you develop your expertise in GCP VM creation, we recommend the following ThoughtSpot U course:

• Node Configuration: GCP

See other training resources at