Will Beattie's Blog

I recently embarked an creating my first GoGrid MyGSI and in my previous post I mentioned that I had an open support case to resolve the fact that I could not create an instance from the image that I saved. After five long days of waiting for some sort of resolution finally the Engineers decide that the image is “unclean” and they can’t debug the issue any further. They did suggest however that I create another MyGSI from scratch.  I wasn’t happy to accept this as a one off problem as I still needed to move an instance over from EC2 so I decided to test the system myself. I created another instance without installing any application files or additional components and connected to the Cloud Storage then ran the prep script. Again I got the same result. It booted me out of RDP but did not change to the status which allows saving the image. I submitted another support request and the finally the cause was identified. Assigning an Internal IP Address (which is required...

Those of you who read my blog would know that I have been using GoGrid for almost a year now as a primary host for our suite of applications. Although the EC2 offering is much richer and far more advanced, GoGrid has the benefit of Windows Server 2008 images which was too compelling to ignore. However choosing to go with GoGrid meant forfeiting the very solid infrastructure that EC2 has. So it was to my delight on August 10th that GoGrid announced MyGSI . “The MyGSI feature allows you to create, save, and store a "Server Image" in which to instantiate Database and Web/App Servers from.” My requirement was to set up a Windows Server 2003 – 64-bit image with IIS, SQL Server 2005 Express, MSMQ, SMTP Service and FTP Service. Pretty standard setup really for a .NET app. The first (of many) disappointments was that there is no way to create an image from a running instance. This is a big PITA and is one of the key reasons why it’s taken me till now to try out the new o...