I actually went through this same scenario about a week ago here at ECU during a planned power outage for our datacenter. The process you need to follow is:
Go to Manage Schedules Under Schedules, create a name for your "offline" time and click Add. Once you are at the Edit Schedule page you will need to setup the times when VCL will be AVAILABLE. Take note of the statement about the start/end times being Sunday 12:00 am. So, for example, if you needed to have your downtime this weekend from Saturday at 8:00 pm - Sunday at 12:00 pm then you would want to create the following schedule: Start Time: Sunday 12:00 pm End Time: Saturday 8:00 pm This means that VCL will be available from Sunday 12:00 pm till Saturday evening at 8:00 pm (which in our example is when the downtime would begin). The schedule would then repeat itself again which means it would be available beginning at 12:00 pm on Sunday (which is when downtime would end). The next step is to go to Manage Computers and then Computer Utilities. You will want to choose "Check All" (or just check whichever vm's/blades you want to make unavailable) and at the bottom you will want to change the schedule to the new schedule you just created. You can test to make sure your schedule worked correctly by creating a reservation during the time when VCL should not be available. Please note that when you choose the future time for the reservation (when testing your schedule) that you have to click submit on the reservation page before it shows you that the computers are not available during that time (it will actually show the end user a big grid of when VCL is available and when it is not so they should be able to see when the "downtime" is scheduled to be over). One thing to remember is to change your schedule back to the normal schedule (which for ECU is 24x7) or else it will repeat itself each week. Thanks to Andy at NCSU for taking the time to explain this process to me! Please let us know if you have any other questions or problems with this process. David Creech East Carolina University On 2/5/10 9:23 AM, "Liz Wendland" <l...@duke.edu> wrote: Hi, I am wondering if maybe VCL can already do this... Sometimes we need to take our VCL system offline for maintenance of some aspect. Generally we know about these times well in advance. We'd like to be able to block out all our nodes so they can't be reserved during that future maintenance window. I was imagining I could create a web-form where someone could set the start and end times and even enter a message that would be posted within the VCL web applications for our users so they know about the upcoming downtime. I've looked at block allocations and they don't see quite right because they want to install an image on the VMs and we don't want that - we would like the distribution of images to stay the same. I have also looked at the Maintenance state, but there currently isn't a way to set those for the future and again, the system wants to re-image the nodes when it later becomes 'available'. I am considering creating a new state and altering vcld to understand it, but I thought I should check with you guys first - you must run into the same situation occasionally. How do you handle it? Thanks for all your hard work! -- Liz Wendland Duke University Office of Information Technology David Creech Technology Support Analyst ACE Student Support Center Coordinator Academic Technologies Rawl Building - 108 East Carolina University 252-328-9544 cree...@ecu.edu
