2013-04-08 - External Maintenance

[EHM-0654 Murray]

Just to say at the very start, this is coming from PowerVPS, we have absolutely no control over this:-

The node on which your VPS is hosted is scheduled for a migration on 8-April-2013. Migration window is from 2pm to 10pm. In between that time, our Operations team will gracefully stop the VPS and the node and physically migrate the machine and power it back on from our other facility.

There wont be any change in IP address or any configurations or data within the VPS.
 This will not be a VPS level migration and will be a hardware level migration for entire node, from one DC to our new location.

- The hardware node will have to be rebooted as a part of the maintenance and in the process, all VPS servers in the node will be rebooted along with the hardware node. Typically it will just be a quick reboot. But while rebooting the hardware node, the operating system might force the node to run an FSCK. If that is the case, then, the server will be offline until the FSCK completes.

FSCK is a file system check, which is similar to running Scandisk in Windows. We cannot calculate how long it will take and hence we cannot give an exact ETA for this. You can know more about FSCK at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsck

At times, FSCK will restart even if it completes once and that will mean more downtime and hence we schedule a longer maintenance window. If the node reboots without an FSCK, it will be back online in 5 mins. But if it goes for FSCK, it could take a couple of hours and there won\'t be anything we can do to speed things up.

- We will send you a confirmation email right before the maintenance window and will send a \'maintenance complete\' notification once it is over. We will be closely monitoring the entire process during that time. You might see downtime during maintenance window. If you are seeing issues after you receive the \'maintenance completed\' notification, please do raise a ticket to support.

- Since we have customers hosted in multiple time zones this maintenance window is selected, so that least number of
customers are affected by the move. We will have full hands on deck to make sure migration goes smoothly.

- We are not expecting any issues, but, if we come across any, then we will notify you regarding the same. In case any problems are encountered, systems which are not rebooted during the scheduled window will be re-scheduled to be rebooted at a later date.

Please note, since they haven't specified a timezone we can't be sure exactly what time this maintenance will be happening. Expect neither the website, the forum, or the FLogger/PIREP communications to work for a while on that day.

[EHM-0654 Murray]

PowerVPS have moved the maintenance window, and finally given us the timezone of the maintenance work.

Hi,

The node on which your VPS is hosted was scheduled for a migration on 8-April-2013 from 2pm to 10pm.  However, we identified a flaw with this migration which can possibly cause more downtime. To avoid any such issues and to make sure we can complete this with out more downtime, we are rescheduling this to 10th April 2013, from 2pm EDT to 10pm EDT.


Please understand, that the decision to move and to reschedule, was not taken lightly and we are doing everything possible to make the move completed as quickly, accurately and with as little customer impact as possible. The vz move has been postponed because of a network flaw, will give us more time to concentrate on one type of node at a time to ensure least downtime during migration window.

So, to confirm in a timezone that makes sense to us, between 2013-04-10 (Wednesday) 19:00Z and 2013-04-11 (Thursday) 03:00Z (*if* they really do mean EST and not EDT... if they mean EDT it's 18:00Z and 02:00Z) the VPS will be turned off and migrated, taking as long as it takes. Apologies in advance from the management team for this, but we're in the same boat as you folks.

[EHM-0654 Murray]

Well, it would seem they needed a *lot* longer than they said they'd need, but all seems to be working well again.