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Basic operations and management

Actions and scheduling

Use the VMs tab to perform managing basic actions such as rebooting, pausing and terminating. Use the hard variants when the VM does not have ACPI support.

  • Use suspend or poweroff for short-term pauses. The resources on the running host will be kept. The VM state will be saved and restored with suspend. With poweroff it will be shut down.
  • Use terminate to shut down and delete the VM.

When the instance is paused it can be resumed again using resume button .

The actions can also be scheduled, e.g. terminate after one week. The schedule can be one-time or periodic.

Lock/unlock

Use lock to avoid unintended actions on an instance.

Advanced actions

Some advanced actions are provided only in the legacy GUI, Sunstone, and some actions are only available for admin users, such as migrate, delete, stop, recover, retry, deploy, undeploy, resched and backup.

Status and states

The status of the virtual machines can be monitored from the VMs tab and information about the capacity, operating system, IP addresses, creation time and monitoring graphs for a specific VM are available in the detail view. Read Virtual Machine States for details of the different states an instance can be in.

Refresh state

You may need to use the refresh button or re-select the instance to get the latest state, associated buttons and menu items.

Backup and restore

To create backups of the data on your virtual machine, we recommend creating disk snapshots. The snapshots can be used for various purposes such as backup, recovery and cloning.

To take a disk snapshot of the current disk state, do the following:

  1. Navigate to the Storage tab of your VM instance.
  2. Press the Snapshot button next to the VM disk, under Actions, and name the snapshot whatever you want.
  3. After the snapshot is completed you can reload the page to see a dropdown menu appear next to the disk. Open the menu and verify the existence of your snapshot.

To restore the disk state to a snapshot, do the following:

  1. Power Off or Suspend the VM instance.
  2. Navigate to the Storage page.
  3. Open the dropdown menu for the disk and press the Revert button. Here it is also possible to export the VM disk to an image using the Save as operation.

It is not possible to undo a revert action

Undoing a "revert to snapshot" action is impossible, reverting to a snapshot will result in dataloss for all data since the creation of the snapshot. It is also impossible to delete a snapshot once it has been reverted to, which isn't an issue but we mention if you were confused about it.

To schedule regularly occuring disk snapshots, do the following:

  1. Navigate to the Action tab of your VM instance.
  2. Press the Add action button.
  3. Select the disk-snapshot-create action in the dropdown menu and then select the disk to backup by using the disk ID, which can be found in the Storage tab of your VM instance.
  4. Check the Periodic box and select when and how often you want your disk to be snapshotted.

Resize capacity

In the Info tab, you can resize the capacity assigned to a VM in terms of the virtual CPUs, memory and CPU allocated. Resizing can, with some limitations, be done live but is preferably done by first poweroff the instance, then resize and resume.

Change public SSH key

To change the public SSH key of an existing VM instance you can click on Update VM Configuration in the Configuration tab and edit the key in the Context tab.

Apps and Marketplace

Applications (Apps) are essentially templates of specific software components required for a particular use case, such as web servers and databases. These can be downloaded from the OpenNebula Marketplace, where users can share their custom-built application templates or download ready-made ones from others.

Instantiate as persistent

If you choose Instantiate as persistent when creating a VM both the template and its image will be copied. Using this persistent copy will preserve the changes made to the VM disks after the instance is terminated. The image can only be used by one VM simultaneously, and the next user will find the changes made by the previous user.