It should be possible to re-provision a VM by doing an OS reload instead of a cancel

[hairyhenderson]

It should be possible to re-provision a VM by doing an OS reload instead of a cancel.

i.e. I want something that acts like knife softlayer server destroy ..., except that instead of cancelling the VM through the SL API, it would instead do an OS reload.

[cphrmky]

@hairyhenderson tagging this as a enhancement request, there's a small amount of work to be done to get this hooked up. High-level overview:

Baseline Info:

• knife-softlayer uses fog-softlayer to talk to the SLAPI
• fog-softlayer can easily do this OS reload
• Caveat: fog-softlayer doesn't currently support that in the Fog::Compute::Softlayer::Server class (which it should), though I can give someone an example of what the request[s] should look like.

Necessary steps:

• Add a method to Fog::Compute::Softlayer::Server called reload_os or similar (fog-core already has a reload method).
• Expose that to knife-softlayer (basically just bump the fog-softlayer version in knife-softlayer.gemspec)
• Build a class in knife-softlayer that is invoked something like this knife softlayer recreate <node name> that:
  • will capture the run_list and attributes that will need to be arguments for rebootstrapping once the OS reload has completed.
  • make the call to SLAPI to initiate the reload then wait-and-check-and-wait-and-check for ready? and sshable?
• use the captured run_list and attributes to re-boostrap

I don't have the bandwidth at the moment to do this personally, but possibly @fernandes or @underscorephil can find someone to tackle it.

@hairyhenderson if you or a member of your team have cycles to make the changes to knife-softlayer it's possible that @underscorephil or @fernandes can get the fog-softlayer changes in place for you to consume.

[cphrmky]

@hairyhenderson , @underscorephil , @fernandes

Just finishing the work to add the reload method to fog-softlayer today, will tackle this next.

[underscorephil]

+1

[cphrmky]

@hairyhenderson,

Here's the feature branch if you'd like to take it for an early test drive and give any feedback you've got.

https://github.com/softlayer/knife-softlayer/tree/feature/server_relaunch

Usage is knife softlayer server relaunch <NODE NAME>. That's going to relaunch the VM and bootstrap it from scratch, same node name, same attributes, etc.

/cc @underscorephil

[cphrmky]

@hairyhenderson ,

This has been merged and a release has been cut. Upgrade to v0.3.12 to pick up this functionality.

/cc @underscorephil

[hairyhenderson]

@cphrmky - thanks! Sorry I never got around to test-driving it... Haven't had the cycles for this for a few weeks. :(

[cphrmky]

@hairyhenderson haha, no worries, I took it for a spin myself, of course other people are going to be better I finding the bugs I've written than I will...