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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.

In this article​

Overview​

Ephemeral storage is available in all Hyperstack 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, while on Windows it appears as the E: drive. By default, it's mounted at /ephemeral on Linux. See Customizing Ephemeral Mounting for advanced setup options.

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

  • Availability: Offered in all regions and included in most GPU flavors. See the flavors documentation to review GPU configurations and ephemeral storage capacity.

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 hibernated or deleted, all data on the ephemeral disk will be permanently lost, and Support cannot recover it.

To prevent unintended data loss:

  • Before hibernating or deleting a VM, back up any critical data from the ephemeral disk to persistent storage, such as a Shared Storage Volume (SSV) 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 Volume (SSV) using the Hyperstack Console:

  1. Create a Volume
    Go to the Volumes page in Hyperstack 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
    Navigate to the Virtual Machines page, 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 or E: on Windows) to the mounted volume.

  4. Safely Change VM State
    Once your data is saved to the volume, you can safely hibernate or delete the VM without risk of losing that data.