As part of our effort to improve the reliability of our infrastructure, we are migrating our Virtual Machine Cluster (commonly known as "SKY") from the OpenStack platform to the oVirt platform.

Our decision to migrate to oVirt has come after months of evaluating the manageability and reliability of both products. Our conclusion is that oVirt both fits our use-case and our management workflow much better than OpenStack. In addition, VM users should see increased performance, simplified management, and better integration with other RCC offerings.

Most VM users will notice no difference when we move their VMs to the new system. In fact, we have already moved over half of the running VMs into the new system! If, however, you used the OpenStack dashboard to manage your VMs or if you have used SSH/SFTP to access your virtual machine, there are few things to know:

• All VMs are now running CentOS v7.1.
• You can now use your RCC credentials to login to any VM that you manage via SSH or SFTP.
• Restarting VMs can now be done from the VM itself, the same way you would reboot any other standard Linux system: systemctl reboot.
• There is currently no online control panel for starting, stopping, rebuilding, or accessing the console for VMs. We are working on a simple solution for VM managers, but for now, you will need to send us a support request if you need to perform any of these actions.
• You can now give other RCC users SSH or SFTP access to your VM by managing groups on the RCC website.

If you have any questions or issues, please let us know.