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Ephemeral Storage ​

Ephemeral storage is a temporary drive that is attached to a virtual machine (VM) during its runtime for storage of the active workload. Unlike persistent disks, which retain data during hibernation or deletion of a VM, ephemeral disks are only used for temporary storage. To prevent data loss, back up the data from the ephemeral disk to one or more Shared Storage Volumes (SSVs) before modifying the state of your virtual machines, see the How to Save Ephemeral Data for instructions.

Note

Ephemeral disks are intended for temporary storage only. Ephemeral storage is a drive that is attached to a virtual machine (VM) for use during its runtime and is recommended for active workloads, such as caching or data generated during program execution.

When the virtual machine is hibernation or deletion, data on the temporary disk will be erased and cannot be recovered. To prevent data loss, please do not store business-critical or persistent data on temporary storage, such as databases or other important operational data.

For persistent storage requirements, please use volumes.

Overview ​

Ephemeral storage is available in all Exabits Cloud regions and included as part of most GPU flavor configurations. It is provisioned automatically with your VM and designed for fast, temporary access to runtime data. Storage capacity scales with the selected flavor configuration.

  • Presentation: The ephemeral disk on Linux VMs appears as /dev/vdb. By default, it's mounted at /ephemeral on Linux.

  • Capacity: Disk size varies by GPU type and is proportional to the number of GPUs in the flavor.

  • Availability: Offered in all regions and included in most GPU flavors.

Avoiding Data Loss from Ephemeral Storage ​

Ephemeral storage is non-persistent and tied directly to the life cycle of a virtual machine. If your VM is deleted, all data on the ephemeral disk will be permanently lost, and Support cannot recover it.

To prevent unintended data loss:

  • Before deleting a VM, back up any critical data from the ephemeral disk to persistent storage, such as a Shared Storage Volumes (SSVs) as described in the How to Save Ephemeral Data steps below.

  • When contacting Support about VM issues, inform us if the VM contains important data on ephemeral storage.

How to Save Ephemeral Data ​

To avoid losing important workload data stored on ephemeral storage, you can back it up to a Shared Storage Volumes (SSVs) using the Exabits Cloud Console:

  1. Create a Volume: Go to the Create Volume page in Exabits Cloud and click Create Volume. Enter a name and size for the volume, and make sure to select the same region as your virtual machine.
  2. Attach the Volume to Your VM: Select your VM, and click Attach Volume. Choose the volume you just created and confirm the attachment.
  3. Move Data to the Volume: Inside your VM, mount the attached volume. Then copy or move the data from the ephemeral disk (typically /ephemeral on Linux) to the mounted volume.
  4. Safely Change VM State: Once your data is saved to the volume, you can safely delete the VM without risk of losing that data.