[Labs-l] IMPORTANT: mothballed instances, marked for death!

Fri Sep 12 22:34:32 UTC 2014

During the datacenter migration back in March, I 'mothballed' quite a 
few projects and instances.  Such projects had their data and VMs moved 
to eqiad, but were left in a disabled and/or compressed state.  A very 
large number of those projects and/or instances have been untouched 
since, presumably because they're no longer of interest to anyone.

Labs is getting a bit full recently, and Marc and I are about to rebuild 
one of the virt servers which will reduce capacity (temporarily) by a 
further 10%.  So, I'm turning a hungry eye towards those abandoned 
instances.

If you have mothballed instances (or entire projects) that sit untouched 
but that you care about, please contact me immediately (or boot up the 
instances, which will result in them no longer looking mothballed.)  If 
you take no action, here's what will happen:

- Instances in a 'shutoff' state and unbooted since March may be 
deleted, capriciously and without further notice.
- Projects that are empty as a result of mothballed instances being 
deleted will also be deleted, and their shared storage lost forever.

Some projects contain a mix of active and mothballed instances.  In such 
cases the mothballed instances may be deleted but the projects and 
shared data will remain.

-Andrew