[Planetlab-devel] PlanetLab updates

[David M. Johnson]

Hello again, Mark,

I'm slightly confused on the upgrade path after your email this
morning (apologies in advance if I missed something!).  After Larry's inital
announcement, it seemed that the Emulab portal to PlanetLab would be able to
continue to use the old PLC to do slice creation, adding nodes to slices, and
all the rest, until the rollout after the alpha period.  Now, since changes to
the old PLC will not be propagated to the new PLC database on/after Monday,
what's the best way for us to keep the Emulab portal functioning, so that we
can continuing creating and modifying slices on the PlanetLab nodes running the
old NM, but also so that the new PLC database will have the state changes (so
that once the switchover is complete, the new PLC will have correct info) ?

I realize that modifying the old PLC state is undesirable, but based on the
announcements, I'm not sure how else we can keep our portal functioning.

Unless the new PLC can give us tickets to setup slivers on the old NM running
on the PlanetLab nodes prior to the rollout (or perhaps there's another
mechanism?), I presume that we'd need to do all xmlrpc operations on both PLCs,
so that 1) the Emulab portal can continue to function and create slices and
slivers, and 2) the new PLC will contain all the information necessary to
manage nodes once the new NM is rolled out to all the nodes.

We are keen to minimize downtime of the Emulab portal to PlanetLab at this
time, since we have an internal service that makes heavy use of it, as Robert
Ricci pointed out when we exchanged email about the PLC 4.0 deployment in
January.

Thanks for your help!


david

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David Johnson <johnsond at flux.utah.edu>
Flux Research Group, University of Utah School of Computing
(http://www.flux.utah.edu, http://www.emulab.net)