The zone 'projects/xxxx/zones/us-west3-a' does not have enough resources available to fulfill the request. Try a different zone, or try again later

Question

I have a suspended instance that I want to bring up, but cannot because of the error in the title. I'd expect that there'd be an obvious way to choose a different zone in which to resume the instance, but I see nothing. As long as us-west3-a is overbooked, how can I resume execution of this instance elsewhere?

I'm not running a major service - this one instance is the entire operation, and given what I'm running (an ancient game server) load balancing or multi-region availability is out of the question. I just need to be able to run this instance somewhere when the need strikes.

Answer 1

To be able to resume your instance in another zone you will need to create a snapshot first then create a new instance using the snapshot you have created. There are no possible ways to directly transfer an instance to another zone. Below are the step by step procedure to do so:

How to create snapshot

1. Go to the Compute Engine page > then select Snapshot.
2. Click Create Snapshot.
3. Select the disk of your instance.
4. Please check all your settings
5. Once you're done, please click the "Create" button.

How to create instance from a snapshot with new zone

1. Go to Compute Engine > Snapshots
2. Select the snapshot you need
3. Click Create Instance
4. Provide a name for your new instance
5. Select the new Region or Zone
6. Select other options needed ie. Machine type or GPU
7. Edit other settings like network and disk if needed
8. Click Create

Once the instance is created and started, it will be in the same state at the time you created the snapshot.

For more information and troubleshooting about the Stockout error, you can check the GCP official documentation.