Sole-Tenant Nodes

Sole-tenant nodes provide dedicated physical servers in Google Cloud's data centres where only your VMs run. Unlike standard Compute Engine VMs that share physical hosts with other customers (multi-tenancy), sole-tenant nodes ensure that your workloads are physically isolated from other tenants.

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Why Sole-Tenant Nodes?

While multi-tenancy is the norm in public cloud computing and is secure by design (Google's custom hypervisor provides strong isolation), some organisations have requirements that mandate physical isolation:

Compliance and Regulatory Requirements

Some industry regulations and compliance frameworks require workloads to run on dedicated hardware:

Requirement	Example
HIPAA	Healthcare data that must not share physical hosts
PCI DSS	Payment card data requiring physical isolation
Government	Classified or sensitive workloads with strict tenancy rules
Financial services	Trading systems requiring dedicated performance

Software Licensing

Many enterprise software licences (Oracle, SQL Server, Windows Server) have per-core or per-socket licensing terms that require you to know the exact physical hardware your VMs run on. Sole-tenant nodes provide the visibility needed to comply with Bring Your Own Licence (BYOL) agreements.

Performance Isolation

While Google's hypervisor prevents noisy-neighbour effects at the security level, some workloads are sensitive to CPU cache contention, memory bandwidth sharing, or NUMA topology. Sole-tenant nodes eliminate these concerns.

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How Sole-Tenant Nodes Work

A sole-tenant node is a physical Compute Engine server dedicated to your project. You create a node group that contains one or more nodes, and then schedule your VMs onto those nodes.

Node Templates

A node template defines the configuration of a sole-tenant node:

# Create a node template
gcloud compute sole-tenancy node-templates create my-node-template \
  --region=europe-west2 \
  --node-type=n2-node-80-640

The node type n2-node-80-640 means an N2-family node with 80 vCPUs and 640 GB of memory.

Available Node Types

Node Type	vCPUs	Memory (GB)	Local SSD
n1-node-96-624	96	624	Optional
n2-node-80-640	80	640	Optional
n2d-node-224-896	224	896	Optional
c2-node-60-240	60	240	Optional
m1-node-96-1433	96	1,433	N/A

Node Groups

A node group manages a set of nodes with the same template:

# Create a node group with 2 nodes
gcloud compute sole-tenancy node-groups create my-node-group \
  --zone=europe-west2-a \
  --node-template=my-node-template \
  --target-size=2

Scheduling VMs on Sole-Tenant Nodes

# Create a VM on a sole-tenant node group
gcloud compute instances create isolated-vm \
  --zone=europe-west2-a \
  --machine-type=n2-standard-16 \
  --image-family=debian-12 \
  --image-project=debian-cloud \
  --node-group=my-node-group