Dear SWITCHengines users,
On Wednesday, August 4th, between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., essential electrical work will be taking place at the site of our Zurich region. As all systems have dual-homed power, this should not be service affecting.
However, the electrical work involves cutting regular power to the entire data center, causing a simultaneous failover of all hardware to battery power. Since this comes with an elevated risk of hardware failures, we announce this maintenance window as a precaution.
Best regards,
Michael Helminger
--
SWITCH
Michael Helminger | Infrastructure and Platform as Service
Werdstrasse 2, P.O. Box, 8021 Zurich, Switzerland
phone +41 44 268 15 15 | direct +41 44 268 15 28
michael.helminger(a)switch.ch | https://www.switch.ch
Dear SWITCHengines Users,
The weather is not quite Spring-like, but nonetheless we are doing some spring cleaning at SWITCHengines.
One of the original platforms for communication when SWITCHengines started was https://forum.cloud.switch.ch, intended for users to exchange information and knowledge.
It has become increasingly quiet over the years with maybe 1-3 messages a year so sadly we think it is time to gently retire it before the new academic year.
You can still reach us at engines-support(a)switch.ch<mailto:engines-support@switch.ch> and on Twitter at @SWITCHengines .Though the use of the forum would seem to show otherwise, if there is enough general interest in a community forum, please let us know as we’re working on harmonising this kind of interest throughout SWITCH and not just for SWITCHengines alone.
All the best,
Ann Harding
Dear SWITCHengines users,
Our next two OpenStack versions, Stein and Train are now planned. Stein is ready to deploy but as this is a particularly sensitive time of year for many of you, although we expect no extended interruptions to service we will hold the deployment until after the peak exam periods.
As with previous upgrades, to reduce impact we upgrade individual components on a rolling basis each morning, with those that have a higher risk taking place in the maintenance windows.
The upgrade calendar for Stein is as follows:
August 24th - Keystone Authentication Service (Global Change).
Lausanne will be upgraded between 27th August and 8th September
Zürich will be upgraded between September 6th and September 16th.
During this time, access to VMs is not expected to be impacted, and control plane operations may experience a few moments interruption during the maintenance windows of Mondays 21:00-Tuesdays 09:00 and Thursdays 21:00-Fridays 09:00.
OpenStack Stein is the last release in which the legacy OpenStack Load Balancer as a Service (LBaaS) is supported. The following OpenStack upgrade, Train, is provisionally scheduled for Q4 so that we maintain supported releases.Therefore, as part of the Stein upgrade, we will deploy the supported loadbalancer replacement, Octavia , and work with you to migrate from the deprecated service. Following a short period of extended production testing by the SWITCHengines team, we will invite LBaaS users to migrate to Octavia. This will require configuration changes on your side, as well as some advice, support and planning.
If you have any questions or concerns about the maintenance schedule and EOL notification for LBaaS, please let us know at engines-support(a)switch.ch<mailto:engines-support@switch.ch>
All the best,
Ann Harding
