Email sent to sysadmin - May 4th 2012:

Dear Sysadmin,

I would like to have the slicer factory restart every Saturday.

Considering that:
1) the factory is running MacOSX
2) 2 virtual machine are running (Windows and ubuntu)

Which strategy would you recommend to setup such a mechanism ?

See http://www.na-mic.org/Bug/view.php?id=1961

Thanks for you help,

From Matt - May 7 2012:

It’s less painfull to the filesystem of the vm to have the os of the vm restart itself.. not the vm server restart the os.

So just make crons/tasks to reboot inside each.

Matt

Email sent to sysadmin - June 25 2012:

Hi Matt,

The idea was to restart the host of the VMs. In that case, shutting gracefully the VM would be required.

Do you have any script that would allow to gracefully shutdown a VM ?

Thanks

From Matt - June 25 2012:

so, I suppose if you need to reboot the host as well it's a different ballgame. but, I meant just initiate the shutdown by a scheduled task/cron job..

both unix and windows have a shutdown command that can be called from batch file or directly in a cron. Reboot for linux more likely..

I forgot the shutdown for windows options.. try shutdown /?

if you need the host as well.. i'd have to research.

matt

From Matt - June 25 2012:

if you are looking for both the vm's to restart as well as the host(factory) this may work:

basically if we have the parallel tools installed on the vm, which I did for the ubuntu instance, I'm unsure about windows. You can run this command without the --kill option. But, if the tools aren't installed it will perform a hard stop.. same as if you pulled the power plug..

So, we should get the tools on the instances to make sure we do not have to deal with corrupted file systems all the time.

http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v4/wl/docs/en/Parallels_Command_Line_Reference_Guide/23466.htm

son on factory in mac os, create a script:

stop ubuntu
stop windows

wait a few minutes for machines to stop.

reboot host os

ensure host is set to start parallels and run vm instances at boot.

or it could be that parallels calls a soft shutdown of vm instance when it shuts down normally.. so in that case just schedule a restart in a cron on the host, and make sure parallel tools are installed on vm instances.

Currently:

• "factory" is only doing MacOSX build and is restarting every day at 10.50pm
• "Windows and Linux virtual machine running on "factory-south" are also restarting every day at 10.50pm