Virtual Machine Expiration
Purpose
Regular expiration of virtual machines (VMs) has been introduced to prevent forgotten VMs from consuming resources in the cloud. There is no hard limit to the actual life time of a VM, but there will be regular notifications and VM owners must react to confirm they still require their existing VMs.
Overview
A shutdown action will scheduled for each VM in MetaCloud. That will make sure that the VM is shut down, typically several months after the action was scheduled. VM owners may delete these scheduled actions, thus indicating that they are indeed still interested in keeping their VMs alive. A new shutdown action will be scheduled for later, making the overall life span of the VM longer.
Should the user fail to extend the life time of the VM, it will be terminated at the scheduled time. Persistent disks will be stored, other data will be dropped. Therefore it is crucial to set up disk persistence properly when creating new VMs!
We have not yet decided on the precise length of the notification period, and adjustments are to be expected. Currently the period is three months, i.e., you will be asked to confirm your interest in any given VM of yours every three months.
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3 weeks before the expiration of the running machine, the owner will receive an e-mail (from address noreply@cloud.metacentrum.cz) to his mailing address, mentioned in the Perun system, where he is notified that his machine is near to its end. Check your SPAM folder.
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Register Publications Acknowledging the Use of Our Resources
Our regular invitation to extend the life span of your virtual machines makes a good opportunity to consider your recent work and register your publications containing the Acknowledgement of MetaCentrum Resources. Please do not forget that by acknowledging us you effectively “pay” for the use of our resources. In the future MetaCloud will introduce a fairshare mechanism similar to that already deployed in our grid.
Deleting Scheduled Actions
All scheduled actions are shown in the graphical user interface, in the Actions tab of the VM detail page. Note that the Actions tab is only displayed in the User view.
The figure below shows, for example, a single scheduled terminate-hard action. Cancel it by clicking its trash icon as indicated.
