Monash HCI upgrade

As part of ongoing commitment to service improvement and bringing higher availability to the resource infrastructure, the monash-01 availability zone of the Monash Research Cloud compute capacity has been uplifted with new compute capacities and innovative hyper-converged infrastructure.

The new hypervisors are powered with AMD EPYC processors which provide significant performance improvement and security. Additionally we have taken the opportunity to further strengthen the existing hyper-converged configuration environment and performance. This offers higher availability, easier live migrations, and improved infrastructure operations.

The instances running at monash-01 prior to 15th of September 2022 need to be moved to the new infrastructure. The instances launched after 15th of September 2022 at monash-01 AZ will be scheduled on the new infrastructure by default, without any extra action required from the users. 

Users who have been identified as impacted by this have been emailed with the subject:
[Action Required] monash-01 new capacities and requirement to move the instances from old hosts 

The instances listed in the email will need to be relaunched [not just rebooted] in order to use the new infrastructure. 

Users who do not relaunch their instances will have their instances shut down, locked and marked as pending deletion.

As a general note we recommend that if the instance's operating system is End of Support, users should relaunch to a newer and up-to-date operating system.

If the instance is using deprecated m1, m2, c2 and r2 flavors, please relaunch them to the current t3, m3, c3 and r3 flavors. Simply relaunching the VM(s) with the current standard flavors will automatically deploy them on the new hypervisors.

You can find instructions on how to create a snapshot and relaunch your instance on the links below:

• Creating an instance snapshot: https://tutorials.rc.nectar.org.au/snapshots/03-create-instance-snapshot
• Launching an instance from snapshot: https://tutorials.rc.nectar.org.au/snapshots/04-launch-instance-from-snapshot

Please note that Instance snapshots only copy data from the primary root disk of your instance, not from the secondary ephemeral storage or mounted Volume Storage.

Steps to backup additional data not stored on a volume storage

• Backing up data: https://support.ehelp.edu.au/support/solutions/articles/6000085112-backing-up-data
• Steps to remount Volume Storage (if used in your project): https://tutorials.rc.nectar.org.au/volume-storage/01-overview

Once the instances have been relaunched, please ensure you have upgraded the packages and kernel to the latest version available in your instance.

Alternatively, If you are running a "boot-from-volume" instance. You should not need to do any snapshotting. Just re-launch a new instance from the same volume.

When launching a new instance you can select to launch from a volume like so:

And select the existing Volume from the list.

Please be aware that the research cloud compute infrastructure is not designed to be highly available. We strongly recommend that users should take this opportunity to ensure appropriate backup strategies are in place for critical data and/or services before making any changes.