Thursday, March 6, 2014

Nimbus users on Hotel and Sierra should now start migrating to KVM

If you are currently using Nimbus on Sierra or Hotel, or if your work relies on an existing virtual machine image hosted on those clouds, then you need to take action.

In a few days, the Nimbus cloud on Sierra will become unavailable. As a result, following the recent announcement of changes in Nimbus cloud allocations on FutureGrid, the Hotel cloud will be gradually converted from Xen to KVM virtualization. In addition to being compatible with the Alamo Nimbus cloud, this allows us to support recent Linux distributions and brings better compatibility with virtual machine images built using other virtualization platforms (VirtualBox for example).

We have now made available a Nimbus cloud on Hotel using KVM virtualization. The existing Xen cloud on Hotel will remain available until the end of March to allow users to migrate their environments. To start using the Nimbus Hotel KVM cloud, extract a fresh copy of your credentials and use the hotel-kvm.conf configuration file.

As soon as possible, you should migrate your Xen images from Sierra and Hotel to a KVM cloud: either to Alamo or to the new Hotel KVM cloud.

If your virtual machine image only contains small modifications from the base environment, we advise to create a new one using the base images on those clouds.

If your virtual machine image contains heavy modifications, you can follow our instructions to convert your Xen image to KVM.

If you need any assistance for this process, please contact us through the FutureGrid help system.