Please be aware there will be a scheduled outage in the melbourne-qh2 and melbourne-qh2-uom availability zones of the NeCTAR Research Cloud:

Duration: 4 hours
Start Time: 09:00 AEDT Tue Nov 10th 2015
End Time: 13:00 AEDT Tue Nov 10th 2015

The outage is required for the University of Melbourne Network Services to do firmware upgrade on our switches to enable support for new cloud infrastructure equipments and for the future separation of enterprise and research networks.

Prior to the outage, if you have running instances in the melbourne-qh2 and melbourne-qh2-uom availability zones, you will receive a first notice 4 weeks out, then a reminder notice 1 week out, to let you know of the impact and actions you should take. While we expect no data loss to occur, we encourage you to take snapshots of your instances prior to the outage, for added protection.

At the start of the outage window, Melbourne Node will need to shut down all VMs in the melbourne-qh2 and melbourne-qh2-uom availability zones, then the compute nodes hosting them, to prevent data loss. Network Services will take over, flash new firmware on the switches and reboot them. Once testing has been completed, Melbourne Node will turn on the compute nodes, restart previously active VMs and notify users via email.

The availability zone melbourne-np is unaffected.

We apologise for the inconveniences and will aim to restore services as soon as possible.