Scheduled Actions

 The screens you can view in CloudCreator depend on your assigned role. See Roles and Permissions for more information.

Scheduled Actions allows you to:

  • Create schedules to power on/off your resources at specific dates and times.
  • Include multiple resources in a single schedule, and select the order that your resources will perform the action.
  • See at a glance all the actions you've scheduled, and quickly edit, copy or delete a schedule.

 

Resources Supported: Scheduled Actions currently supports vCloud PAYG, vCloud Standard and Managed VMware compute resources. In a future release, AWS and Azure compute resources will be supported.

 

Topics

Navigate to the Scheduled Actions Page

To navigate to the Scheduled Actions page, follow these steps:

 

1. From anywhere in CloudCreator, select the Scheduled Actions icon in the sidebar.

 

 

2. The Scheduled Actions page shows the details of any existing schedules that your organisation has in place. From here, you can create, copy, edit or delete schedules.

These actions are described in the sections below.

 

 

Create a Schedule

Follow the steps below to create a new Schedule.

 

Before You Begin

If you are creating Schedules for multiple resources and actions, please remember that there is:
- a 10 second delay between the power actions of each individual resource.
- a minimum of 10 minutes between the two Actions possible on a single schedule.

Example: A schedule to 'Power Off' 6 VMs will take about a minute to be completed (5 x 10 seconds of 'inter-resource' delay between each VM Power action).
The same schedule may have a 'Power On' action of the VMs after that. The 'Power On' action cannot be set to start until at least 10 minutes after the 'Power Off' action was initiated.
 

1. From the Scheduled Actions Page click Create Schedule.

 

 

2. The General Information screen appears. Complete the fields, then click Go to Resource Selection. Use the table below as a guide to completing the fields.

 

 

Use this table as a guide to completing each field:

 

Field What to Enter
Name Add a meaningful name for your schedule.
Actions

Each schedule can perform one or two actions. Select the action or actions you want from the dropdown.

 



Notes:

  • Power Off: This option works like a power switch. The VM is abruptly powered off, with no consideration for work in progress.
  • Shutdown: This option sends a shut down signal to the operating system to shut down gracefully. It can be used with vCloud PAYG, vCloud Standard or Managed VMware compute resources that have 'VM Tools' installed. If the VM Tools are not installed, the 'Shutdown' is automatically converted to a 'Power Off'.
  • When a resource is already powered off: When a schedule executes an action (eg. to power off) and the compute resource is already powered off, it will still succeed, but without making any changes. This scenario also applies to other actions.
Description This is an optional field.
Enabled checkbox Must be ticked to enable the action.
Occurrence

Select either:

  • Ad-hoc (single occurrence)
  • Daily
  • Weekly (once each week)
  • Weekday (daily from Monday to Friday)
  • Monthly
  • Yearly
Date / Time The date/time(s) that the action(s) will first occur.


3. The Resource Selection screen appears. Use the search tips below to locate the VMs you want to include in the Schedule.

 

 

Search Tips:

  • Use the search function  at the top of the page, or

  • Hover over the Name header and click on the Funnel icon  that appears. Start to type the server name into the field, or

  • Apply multiple filters to refine your resource list. Hover over a column heading and click the Filter icon . Then select the attributes you want to view and click Apply.

 

Note:
- When adding multiple resources to a Schedule, ensure that you plan the timing of the actions to allow enough time for them to be completed. See Before You Begin above.
- If you have recently created a new vCloud PAYG or vCloud Standard VM, it may take 20 minutes or more before it is available to be added to your Schedule.

4. Tick the VMs required, click Go to Resource Ordering.

 

5. The Resource Ordering screen appears. Order your resources by inputting a number into each Step# field. This is the order that each resource will perform the action. Then click Go to Confirmation.

 

Example: Resource ordering is useful for applications composed of multiple resources. For example, a UI compute resource, an API compute resource, and a database compute resource. The 'Step #' fields can be used to ensure that the UI compute resource is shut down before the API compute resource, which in turn is shut down before the database compute resource. In the screenshot below, the VM numbered 1 will Power On first, followed by 2. 

 

 

6. The Confirmation screen appears. Check the details are correct and click Create Schedule.

 

 

7. The details of the new schedule will appear in the Scheduled Actions page. A notification will appear in the Recent Events panel.

 

How a Schedule is Run

Schedules with multiple resources are actioned at 10 second intervals as follows:

 

Step Action
1

As the Next Action date/time approaches (displayed on the Scheduled Actions page) the action is scheduled for each of the resources, in the order defined in the schedule.
2

The first resource action is scheduled at the 'Next Action' date/time, with each successive resource scheduled at 10 second intervals. This 10 second pause avoids the consequences of a schedule containing 50 compute resources being all powered off at the same time. This has data centre performance benefits and helps reduce monitoring false alarms.

 

Example: If a schedule contains 6 resources, the resource level actions will be scheduled over one minute from the 'Next Action' date/time.

 

At the time your schedule runs, if the vCentre containing your VMs is heavily loaded, or many of your servers take longer than 10 seconds each to shut down, later steps in the schedule may be slightly delayed.
3

If a schedule is powering off a number of resources, and for some reason one resource refuses to power off, the schedule will continue past that resource and ask all the remaining resources to power off. The same rule holds true for other types of action.

 

Note: The Power On/Off Actions are requested in the order specified by the Schedule, however not all power actions take the same length of time to occur. The power action of one VM may be completed before, or concurrently with the power action of the VM scheduled before it. The inter-resource delay (10 seconds) will usually mitigate this, but it's still possible for power actions to be completed slightly out of sequence.

 

 

Copy or Edit a Schedule

Once you have created a schedule, you can copy or edit it. Copying allows you to quickly create a new schedule, without having to re-select the resources.

 

Example: You have a schedule to power off your 20 'test' compute resources every Friday evening and power them on each Monday morning. To cope with a one-off event such as a Waitangi Day holiday occurring on a Monday, you could copy the original schedule, change the occurrence to 'Ad-hoc' and update the date/time(s) to turn the resources off over Waitangi Day.

 

Steps

Follow the steps below to copy or edit a schedule:

 

1.  On the Scheduled Actions page, locate the schedule you want to use, and click either the Copy icon , or the Edit icon 

 

 

2. The General Information screen appears. Here you need to:

  • Update the fields as required
  • Carefully check and/or change the action date/s and time/s. The dates/times must be in the future.
  • If you are copying a schedule, ensure that the Enabled checkbox is ticked, as this will be 'unticked' by default. 

 

Note: If a schedule is copied without any changes to the date/time it will result in two overlapping schedules. This should be avoided.

 

 

3. Click Go to Resource Selection.

 

4. Work your way through the subsequent screens to:

  • Add or remove resources if required,
  • Confirm the order the resources will perform the action, and
  • Review and confirm the creation of the new schedule.

 

See Create a Schedule above if you need more information about the individual screens.

 

5. The new schedule will appear on the Scheduled Actions page. A notification will appear in the Recent Events panel.

 

Delete a Schedule

Follow the steps below.

 

1. From the Scheduled Actions page, locate the schedule you want to delete and click the Delete icon .

 

 

2. A confirmation message will appear. Click Delete to confirm.

 

3. A notification will appear in the Recent Events panel.

 

View History

To view the history of your scheduled actions, click the View History link.

 

 

The historical record of your scheduled actions will appear. Click on the plus icon next to each Schedule Title to view the data.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 

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