[Labs-announce] IMPORTANT: Can your instance tolerate a reboot?

[Andrew Bogott]

Executive summary:

I'm going to reboot a ton of instances at random times next week. If you 
don't want me to reboot yours, email me.

Don't worry about Tools or Deployment-prep; they're already on the 
'handle with care' list.

Explanation:

I've been migrating instances to new hardware like crazy, and this 
morning discovered that, upon arrival on a new server, instances are 
taking up MUCH more disk space than they were.  In some cases, 10 or 15 
times as much.

This turns out to be an issue with live migration and copy-on-write 
instances.  The live migration code doesn't know about 
never-used-and-not-allocated-space in an instance, so when I migrate an 
xlarge instance that only used 8G of disk space (but had an allocated 
160G of space), live-migrate copies that extra 152G of emptiness, thus 
foiling all of our attempts to safely overprovision.

Cold migration (which involves shutting down an instance and copying the 
whole VM in one lump) does not have this problem.  So, two things are 
going to happen:

- Instances that have not yet moved to the new hardware will be cold 
migrated rather than live migrated.  That means a shutdown, a few-minute 
delay, and a restart.

- Large and XLarge instances that have already migrated need to be 
re-shrunk to their proper copy-on-write size.  That's pretty quick, but 
also requires a stop and start.

If the idea of a few minutes of downtime for your instance doesn't worry 
you, then you can do nothing.  If you need your downtime scheduled /or/ 
if downtime is unacceptable, just let me know.  I can live-migrate a few 
extra-precious instances and avoid downtime if needed.  Don't hesitate 
to ask.

None of this will start until Monday the the 4th.  That gives us a good 
long while to get Tools squared away, and also gives you a good long 
time to notice this email :)

Sorry this upgrade has involved so many additional complications!

-Andrew