Enhancement: Suspend to RAM (cli: vm pause)

[lurendrejer]

Xen has the ability to Pause a VM (Suspend to RAM). Which is instant. The XCP-Center gui only has the Suspend to disk feature - which takes a long time.

Could a Pause/Unpause button be added to the gui? Maybe even the ability to pause an entire hosts vm's

More info: https://discussions.citrix.com/topic/329558-what-the-difference-between-cli-vm-suspend-and-vm-pause/

Picture of paused VM's:

[lurendrejer]

With this functionality i could pause all my hundreds of vm's within seconds, when the students leave.. Suspending to disk involves writing their three terrabytes of ram to disks.... :-/

[olivierlambert]

What's the use case? Free resources while people are AFK on their VMs?

[lurendrejer]

Save power and money from 15:15 to 08:00.

I'm already doing so via script, but a busy few would like to work late - and having a gui button would enable them to. :)

[lurendrejer]

Pfsense uses 10% of a single core when idling. When running 100-200 doing nothing at all, during the weekend, it gets kinda stupid in cooling, power, etc.

[lurendrejer]

With nested gns3 it gets even worse....

[borzel]

I did some tests with xe vm-pause and xe vm-unpause .. there is some value in having these commands on the gui.

If someone feels free to implement this stuff, I'm the last who won't merge it ;-)

[lurendrejer]

We have quite a few developers with very limited experience (currently under education in software development). I'll see if I can do something.

[olivierlambert]

@lurendrejer tomorrow or Friday we'll release the feature in Xen Orchestra stable. This will support bulk pause/unpause too (in the home view, you'll be able to filter on VMs, select them and do the pause/unpause at once).

[lurendrejer]

Aah neato. I started our project on xoa, self service was perfect except for some glaring issues mostly regarding filtering resources. It uses uuids on creation of resource pools instead of names on usage of the pools. Having the ability to enter "local storage*" is one of the features we are looking to develop in-house. Shared storage is way out of our reach right now, and using uuids instead of names/filters makes every addition of hardware a chore. :)

An example: I have 200vlans, that all my users should be able to connect to their vms. Having the ability to just enter vlan into the resource pool - sure beats entering 200 exact names. And the gui goes bonkers when handling large amounts of objects anyhow. :)

I know the education sector is a special usecase. And I understand completely why xoa does what it does.

[olivierlambert]

You can't rely on name_label to build anything ;) (because a label is not fixed by definition). But feel free to explain your use case (not a technical solution, but your real use case/the thing you want to achieve in the end) on XO bug tracker. Then we could think on how to do so.

[lurendrejer]

I understand - security and stability is key. Except for us.... :)

We need things to be dynamic.

[lurendrejer]

Dynamic resources in self service - that is what we need, actually.

[olivierlambert]

Please open (or update if the issue exists) a ticket in XO repo

[lurendrejer]

I will, if it comes up again. No need to pressure your team for no good reason. We are looking into development on xoa in-house. I'm hoping that we can contribute at a later time.

XCP-center and scripting/automation became the solution for us, for now.

Thank you for a great product though!

[olivierlambert]

FWI, pause/unpause (individually or in bulk) is here in XO since last Thursday :) (see this blog post)

[lurendrejer]

I've been testing it from the minute it released, great work 👍

[cocoon]

I am still thinking about the two possibilities:

• integrate directly into the UI
• add it as plugin

But I tried directly in the UI and it seems possible ... now I need to add unpause ...

[lurendrejer]

You are awesome!

[cocoon]

Way back is working, too. Messages are a placeholder, just to see where that messages appears.

[lurendrejer]

Personally i think that a confirmation dialog for an instant action is a bit overkill. But if it follows some guideline of the GUI - fine by me :)

Pause could have a dialog, unpause - is a bit much to have the user confirm.

[lurendrejer]

Nice unpause-icon btw. And again, great work :)

[borzel]

@cocoon cool!

[cocoon]

if someone wants to test, here a test build:

File: Release.7z Download-URL: https://file.io/ltfoHK Size: ~5MB MD5: 96b50c5adf6ee3214cabb850a40bf294 SHA-1: 715cd7ff4f48559822bc589276d107815f7df3db

It is only working from the context menu, for single and multiple selected VMs. And I disabled confirmation dialogs.

[lurendrejer]

I get a 404-file not found :)

[cocoon]

oops strange, give me some minutes ...

[cocoon]

https://file.io/YvKQnM

... I forgot about this: "after it is downloaded, the file is completely deleted"

So another one here: http://nullupload.com/download-b545d86df0

[lurendrejer]

Hi, i've been quite busy - I'll be testing it tomorrow morning. And, thank you !!

[lurendrejer]

Everything seems to be working as planned! Tested with single and multiple servers.

Thank you!

[lurendrejer]

I don't know about the pause and suspend labels - it isn't intuitive to new users. Shouldn't they be called hibernate and suspend? Maybe suspend to RAM and suspend to disk?

[lurendrejer]

Maybe 'Suspend' should be called Save state. And Pause should be called Suspend/Resume.

That would be instantly recognisable for new users.

[cocoon]

I think renaming an command would not be good, because it should match the api / cli command naming. If somebody is searching for documentation about it, it is much easier if it matches.

But there could be a short info/tooltip or so telling like "(to RAM)" and "(to Disk)".

[lurendrejer]

You a completely right :) But, Force shutdown is called "Hard poweroff" in the API, as far as i know. So, some form of usability-enhanced naming is already in effect.

[lurendrejer]

vmware and hyper-v more or less agreed on suspend/resume and save state in their gui's.

[borzel]

@cocoon I do some testing and add the "fixme" texts to MESSAGES

[borzel]

It's availabe in our pre-release: https://github.com/xcp-ng/xenadmin/releases/tag/v7.6.3-Preview1

@cocoon I also added two new images for the pause state, so the VM icon has not the same pause symbol like in the suspend state

Suspended

Paused