Chapter 40. Virtual Machine and Instance Retirement

CloudForms is a virtual machine and instance lifecycle management tool, and so far we have concentrated on the provisioning phase of that lifecycle. CloudForms also has a virtual machine retirement workflow that lets us manage the retirement and deletion of our virtual machines or instances, both from the provider and from the CloudForms VMDB if required.

The retirement process allows us to treat virtual machines that were provisioned with CloudForms differently from those that might have existed on the provider infrastructure before CloudForms was installed.

Note

We may wish to keep the VMDB record of a virtual machine long after its deletion from the provider, for recording and auditing purposes.

In this chapter we’ll examine the retirement process for virtual machines and instances.

Initiating Retirement

Virual machine or instance retirement is initiated from the Lifecycle menu on the VM details page (see Figure 40-1).

mcla 4001
Figure 40-1. Virtual machine or instance retirement menu

Clicking on Retire this VM raises a request_vm_retire event that begins a chain of relationships through the datastore:

  • request_vm_retire →

    • /System/Event/MiqEvent/POLICY/request_vm_retire →

    • /{Cloud,Infrastructure}/VM/Lifecycle/Retirement →

    • /{Cloud,Infrastructure}/VM/Retirement/StateMachines/VMRetirement/{Default,Unregister}

The relationship ...

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