Thanks Aaron. This explanation helps a whole lot -- I understand this
issue much better.
Toks
Aaron Peeler wrote:
Toks,
Yes this is true for any compute resource - bare-metal or virtual
machine.
The goal being to have that compute resource reloaded and ready for
the next user. In an edu environment - students, faculty have a hard
time waiting more than a minute for anything.
There is a jira issue on power-management. The general idea behind
this is defining a policy on when to power-down compute resources, be
it a blade or vm. Which the policy could be unload all the time or
when the overall system is less than a certain percentage of use.
But in the short-term this unload option could be part of the
provisioning module load routine.
By making use of the data-structure hash, one could find out the
last-state of the compute resource i.e if 'inuse' then call an unload
routine, powerdown and then make the state of the machine available or
release it.
Hope this is what your looking for.
Aaron
Andy,
I would like to revisit this discussion. I believe I understand how
this
is applicable when physical resources are being provisioned. Does the
same hold true for virtual resources? It seems that once a VM is
provisioned through the vmware or esx modules, that it would persist
indefinitely either via reloading or sanitization for as long as it's
host system is up and running, waiting for another user to "claim"
it. I
haven't observed a case where a provisioned virtual resource's lifecycle
actually comes to an end.
Toks
Toks
Aaron Peeler
OIT Advanced Computing
College of Engineering-NCSU
919.513.4571
http://vcl.ncsu.edu
