Hello everyone, We are decommissioning our POWER8 hardware. I want to explain what is happening and what it means for your instances, and I apologize for the short notice.
POWER8 has been heading toward retirement for some time. IBM reached end of service for the POWER8 line in 2024, and while these systems still have hardware support in place, IBM no longer provides firmware or security updates for them. The wider Linux ecosystem has moved on as well: RHEL 9+ and its rebuilds such as AlmaLinux 99+ require POWER9, Ubuntu did the same starting with 22.04+, and Debian is discussing raising its ppc64el baseline to POWER9 for its next release. We have standardized on AlmaLinux for our OpenStack platform, and since AlmaLinux 9 requires POWER9, these nodes have stayed on AlmaLinux 8 and out of step with the rest of the platform. The immediate reason for doing this soon is power contraints. The data center recently raised concerns about the power load in the row where most of this equipment sits. That row carries roughly 80% of our gear, including co-located hardware for hosted projects and OSL's own supporting systems, so reducing its load is a priority. Decommissioning POWER8, which was already planned, is a straightforward near-term way to help with the power issues. On the migration itself: all instances are moving to POWER9. I migrated VMs off POWER8 yesterday afternoon so that several machines could be powered down immediately, and I am moving any remaining instances today. Your instances will continue to run on the new hardware, so no action is required on your part. I expect POWER8 to be fully decommissioned over the next few weeks. Two requests. If you find that you have lost access to your instance after it has moved, please email [email protected] and we will resolve it. And if you no longer need your VM on the cluster, please let us know so that we can free up those resources for other projects. Please let me know if you have any other questions or concerns. Thanks- -- Lance Albertson Director Oregon State University | Open Source Lab
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